Mike Huckabee

I don’t want to politicize Veterans Day, but there is too much in the news at the moment to ignore, relating to the sudden 180 that’s occurred in the relationship between our service members and those in command.

Last Veterans Day, our service members still had a Commander in Chief who had made their welfare a top concern of his Administration. He constantly praised our troops, went out of his way to show respect for them, and made fixing the shameful conditions at VA hospitals one of his first priorities. He was also rightly proud of being the first President in decades who started no new wars. He was willing to use the military when necessary, but he made sure their hands weren’t tied. He respected that these heroic men and women were willing to put their lives on the line for the USA, and he felt it his duty not to make them take that risk for less than vital reasons, and to give them every advantage to make sure they came home safely.

All that changed with the 2020 election. Since Biden came into office, it seems as if he and his staff and top military leaders are more concerned with waging war on our own troops than in ensuring we can defeat our enemies abroad. They treat members of the military with suspicion and hostility, sifting through their social media pages and treating those who express conservative views as worse threats to America than ISIS. Service members are threatened with dishonorable discharges and loss of the benefits they put their lives and limbs on the line to earn, just because they object to taking a vaccine they don’t want (even religious objections are not respected.)

This Administration thinks that illegal immigrants who don’t like the way they were treated when they were detained for breaking our immigration laws deserve $450,000 in compensation, 4-1/2 times more than Gold Star families receive when a loved one is killed in the line of duty. They also continue to spend outrageous amounts of tax money to shelter, support and transport illegal immigrants, even as homeless veterans live on the streets and go without needed medical care.

Perhaps worst of all, Biden’s botched pullout from Afghanistan needlessly cost the lives of 13 brave service members. Yet to this day, the only military person who’s faced any consequences for that was a Marine Lt. Colonel who was jailed and discharged for calling on his superior officers to show some accountability.

So yes, there are many, many reasons why I am counting the minutes until I can vote to throw all of these people out of office. But as I’m checking the boxes on the ballot, I can assure you that the #1 thought in my mind will be, “This is for the veterans.”

Mike Huckabee

San Francisco voters elected a far-left district attorney who promised “progressive justice reform,” and they’re getting it good and hard. Releasing the same career criminals to victimize citizens again and again…not prosecuting nonviolent crimes of less than $950, which has incentivized gangs of shoplifters to openly loot store shelves and drive stores to close…kowtowing to drug addicts and homeless people until the streets are filled with garbage, needles and feces...

But the San Francisco Chronicle reports that city leaders and residents who are now living in constant fear are baffled over what could possibly be done about all this? Maybe the answer is tolerance…of criminals:

“Should they tolerate a high level of burglaries as a downside of city living and focus on barricading their homes? Should people who are repeatedly accused of stealing be targeted with rehabilitation services or incarcerated so they can’t commit more crimes?”

https://redstate.com/sister-toldjah/2021/11/08/san-fran-chronicle-gets-responses-they-deserve-after-ridiculous-tolerance-suggestion-on-burglaries-n472081

Supervisor and “justice reform” advocate Rafael Mandelman is frustrated. The city’s leftist leaders claim that jailing criminals “fails to address the underlying factors” such as poverty and addiction (which they address by giving junkies free heroin needles.) Speaking of two constant repeat offenders, Mandelman said, “It raises tricky questions about incarceration. Because so far we’ve been unable to release (them) without them committing more crimes. And the question for reformers is, ‘What do we do with someone like that?’”

Yes, ‘tis a puzzlement. It’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in an enigma. What can you possibly do with criminals who just keep committing more crimes every time you let them out of jail? Hmmm...

This is your brain on leftism. And you thought heroin was a terrible drug!

RELATED: 

 

p>Did anyone there who’s aghast at the poor criminals having to live behind bars ever consider that if people have to barricade themselves in their homes to be safe, then all the law-abiding citizens will be living behind bars? And they did nothing to deserve it. Well, other than vote for leftist morons to destroy their once-great city.

Last month, Derek Hunter at Townhall.com wrote a great article about how he used to feel sorry for people suffering in Democrat-run cities, but he just can’t empathize anymore because “They vote for this, they elect these idiots who implement these asinine plans and policies.”

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/10/17/democrats-make-it-impossible-to-have-empathy-n2597549

And they just keep doing it again and again, even as everything slides deeper into the sewer. One of his many examples was San Francisco, where as bad as it’s gotten, “not a single elected Democrat in the city (fears) anyone taking their job, outside of the rare primary challenge.” And those primary challengers are usually even further left.

But I’m a little more optimistic. Hunter assumed that Virginia would elect yet another Democrat and keep careening over the leftward cliff, but the voters finally rose up and said, “Enough!” Maybe someday, even San Franciscans will get fed up with dodging criminals, homeless mental cases, addicts, drug needles and feces and actually force themselves to vote for some Republicans to save their city. Maybe they’ll finally stop playing out Einstein’s definition of insanity over and over.

I will maintain hope, but I won’t hold my breath. Unless I’m forced to visit one of these poop-covered, garbage-strewn, urine-soaked, Democrat-run cities. Then I’ll definitely be holding my breath.

Mike Huckabee

This might be the most important article you’ll read all week.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/11/british-muslim-cia-operative-and-author-i-posed-daniel-greenfield/

The Democrats, news media, social media, Big Tech and other allies of the left have been far too successful in clamping down on free speech by conservatives. By accusing people who question their views and narratives of spreading “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech” or whatever other negative buzzwords they can apply to non-leftist views, they’ve succeeded in censoring anyone who questions shady election procedures; discusses the origin or medical treatments for COVID or any problems with the vaccines or mask mandates; or criticizes BLM, Antifa, Critical Race Theory or schools that push any of it. Next, they’re going to make it verboten to question apocalyptic climate change claims.

And who is behind much of this push to destroy free speech and silence any voices that dissent from leftist orthodoxy? Investigative journalist Daniel Greenfield has been digging into the background and organization of one of the leftwing cable channels’ favorite pompous talking heads, British leftist Imran Ahmed of the far-too-influential “Center for Countering Digital Hate.” And how legit is that? As Greenfield puts it, if you liked the dubious Brit material in the Steele Dossier, "you'll love the Center for Countering Digital Hate."

This is the group whose claims about rightwing “hate speech” and “disinformation” are cited by Senate Democrats and Big Tech in their endless quest to criminalize conservative speech. Read what Greenfield has unearthed about the sleazy background and secretive funding, staff and even address of this organization that’s being granted more power over Americans’ speech than the First Amendment. Learn how their next mission, one they’re already succeeding at, is to get Big Tech to censor any skepticism of the movement to confiscate and redistribute the world’s wealth in the name of “climate change.”

And speaking of climate change, see if you don’t feel a sudden chill at reading this quote from Ahmed:

“We can’t suppress anyone’s opinion or their ability to express their opinion, but what we can do is create costs for their speech."

In short, make Americans so afraid of what it might cost them to speak their minds that they censor themselves. Imposing “costs” on speech is by definition the antithesis of free speech.

Read it all, and then demand to know why American media outlets and social media companies are handing over power over our speech to this shady, censorious propagandist? Americans fought a Revolution so that we could express our thoughts freely without fear of retribution from a pompous tyrant with a British accent. Why are we allowing one to take that fundamental right away from us now?

Mike Huckabee

Today is Veterans Day, and with so much going on in the news, it would be tragic for it to be overshadowed or overlooked. Today is about something far more important than politics. It’s about the men and women who make it possible for us even to enjoy the freedom of having elections and the Constitutional right to protest and seek redress when we think our government isn’t doing right by us.

Memorial Day in May is to honor veterans who gave their lives in defense of America. But Veterans Day is to honor all veterans, living or dead, past and present.

It began as Armistice Day, declared by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919, to commemorate the end of World War I. In 1945, World War II veteran Raymond Weeks of Birmingham, Alabama, began a personal crusade to expand Armistice Day into a state holiday honoring all veterans. In 1953, an Emporia, Kansas, shoe store owner named Al King launched a campaign to make it a national holiday. Just one year later, in 1954, he succeeded. It helped that the President was a retired army general from Kansas named Dwight Eisenhower.

Not only is today Veterans Day, but yesterday was the 246th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. It commemorates the day in 1775 when the Second Continental Congress established the Continental Marines to serve in the war against Great Britain. After the Revolutionary War ended, the Marines were disestablished for a time until President John Adams reestablished the Marines as we know the Corps now, on July 11, 1789. But November 10th, 1775, is still considered the birth of the US Marines.

So if you see someone in uniform, this is a great day to say “Thank you” for protecting America’s freedom. Then again, any day is a great day to do that.

Mike Huckabee

Ever since day one of President Biden taking office, a debate has been raging over whether his Administration is malicious or just almost supernaturally incompetent. Nobody wants to believe that a President (or more likely, his staffers who are really pulling the strings) would deliberately inflict so much damage on America. But could anyone possibly be dumb enough to think that throwing open the borders or shutting down the domestic fuel industry or pulling troops out of Afghanistan BEFORE evacuating our people, etc. etc. etc., could be anything other than disastrous?

Then, just as you’ve almost convinced yourself that they couldn't really hate America, they’re just really terrible at their jobs, they give you more evidence that it’s the former. Meet Cornell University law professor Saule Omarova, Biden’s nominee to head the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the most powerful and important regulator of banks, financial institutions and the US dollar.

https://redstate.com/dennis_santiago/2021/11/09/why-congress-is-troubled-by-the-saule-omarova-nomination-n472870

She brings to the job such a long history of hostility to the banking industry and the established system that keeps our economy stable that it’s sort of like appointing Lex Luthor to oversee Superman. Her longtime dream is to kill the private banking industry and create a “National Investment Authority,” an independent government agency that would “centralize and nationalize strategic spending,” replacing the free market economy with a controlled economy, like that of China.

She’s praised the old Soviet Union for not having a “gender pay gap,” and she also recently told a conference that her NIA would direct capital toward “green” energy companies and away from the oil, gas and coal industries, because “we want them to go bankrupt if we want to tackle climate change.”

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/484337/

This is the type of idiotic blather that George Orwell called so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it. FYI: some European nations tried replacing reliable energy sources with insufficient and unstable alternative sources, and they ended up freezing in the winter and dying of heat stroke in the summer. And it could happen again, because leftists never learn from their mistakes, since their disasters are always someone else’s fault.

https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/10/06/friedman-dont-blame-the-greens-for-the-looming-energy-disaster-this-winter-n420638

These are the type of grandiose, revolutionary pipe dreams that hothouse academics have been pushing for years, except the only places they actually work are in theory and in faculty lounges. Previous Administrations were smart enough to keep them there, but Biden actually wants to put one of these bubble-dwelling revolutionaries in charge of our money and our energy supply. That’s why it’s hard to believe anyone could have America’s best interests at heart and do that out of simple stupidity.

Omarova’s ideas are so out there, and would clearly be catastrophic to America’s economy and the free market, that even some Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee, including Sens. Jon Tester, Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Warner, are reportedly reluctant to confirm her. Surely, Biden can find someone better to deal with America’s money and energy interests. If not, try throwing a dart at the Dallas phone book.

Mike Huckabee

Not surprisingly, a federal judge denied an executive privilege request by former President Trump to block the House’s January 6th Committee from having access to White House records. They claim to want to see if Trump helped plan the January 6th “insurrection,” and they’ll be able to get the records Friday, but Trump’s lawyers plan to appeal. Details are here:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/judge-allows-jan-6-committee-access-to-some-trump-documents

Trump accuses the Committee, which is so stacked against him that Nancy Pelosi took the unprecedented move of refusing to accept the Republicans chosen by the House Minority Leader to be on it, of wanting to see White House records and notes of private, classified conversations with advisers to go on a fishing expedition for anything they can leak to smear him.

He called on the Biden White House to defend executive privilege, but they refused. Some legal experts say that's a very short-sighted decision. We’ve already learned that “Contradict Trump” is their prime directive, and any resultant damages don’t matter, whether they’re from opening the border, shutting down oil production or undermining the Presidential right to executive privilege that I imagine Biden will be heavily relying upon himself in the near future.

Incidentally, to show you the politics-uber-alles attitude of this Administration, White House counsel Dana Remus argued that the documents requested by the committee could "shed light on events within the White House on and about January 6 and bear on the Select Committee's need to understand the facts underlying the most serious attack on the operations of the Federal government since the Civil War."

Really? FYI to the White House counsel: Here’s some info on the actual bombing of the Senate in 1983 by leftwing radicals known as the “Armed Resistance Unit,” who also plotted to kill Henry Kissinger:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_United_States_Senate_bombing

And here’s the media-suppressed story of the Bernie Bro who nearly murdered Rep. Steve Scalise in a shooting spree at a Congressional softball practice, where he’d hoped to kill enough Republicans to alter the balance of power in the House. He had a record of violent anti-Republican and anti-Trump media posts, including on a Facebook page called “Trump Is Not My President.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congressional_baseball_shooting

Both of those things sound like more serious attacks on “the operation of the federal government” than January 6th. And like the Civil War itself, they were launched by Democrats.

Mike Huckabee

That’s what investigative reporter John Solomon told FOX NEWS’ Maria Bartiromo on this week’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”

In fact, if you saw our reports last week about new developments in the Special Counsel investigation, Bartiromo’s interviews with both Solomon and former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe will serve as a great summary and follow-up. (And if you didn’t see them, these interviews will help catch you up.) Here’s the link to that episode; Bartiromo’s coverage of the Durham probe starts about 17 minutes in.

https://www.fox.com/watch/1d8b670ef3da2a619b2f20ee00351f82/

Solomon, who told Maria the Danchenko indictment shows the Trump-Russia investigation was built on “lie upon lie upon lie,” has a new report at JUST THE NEWS in which he shifts to Durham’s look at top FBI officials.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/biggest-loser-durham-indictments-james-comeys-fbi

According to Solomon, Durham has two “buckets” of evidence he’s assembling, one implicating the Clinton campaign and the other involving top intel personnel and their willingness to mislead with falsified evidence in their pursuit of Trump. He told Bartiromo that “many other [intel] people are being examined at this moment.”

“There’s no doubt there’s activity inside the grand jury right now,” he said, “aimed at looking at top level officials at the FBI.” Red flags were raised on the Steele “dossier” as early as August of 2016 but were obviously set aside. A month later, the CIA tied it to the Clinton campaign, but sent their report on this to...Peter Strzok. The FBI even had a spreadsheet indicating all the dossier’s impossible or uncorroborated claims.

Solomon says the latest criminal indictment, that of Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source Igor Danchenko --- alleged to have made false statements five times to the FBI --- is just as much an indictment of the FBI as it is of him. The FBI should have seen the serious flaws in the “dossier” even though Danchenko didn’t tell them about getting the material from Clinton ally Charles Dolan.

Incidentally, Dolan wasn’t Danchenko’s only named sub-source. One of the others, “Sub-source #4,” Alexey Sergeyevich Dundich, claims Danchenko “framed” him as a sub-source “to add credibility to his low-quality work.”

“My impression is that Mr. Danchenko fabricated the information published in the Dossier to make quick money,” he declared. “It is apparent to me that the Dossier is a deliberate fraud and a collection of idle rumors.”

But if the “dossier” was so obviously bogus, why didn’t then-FBI Director James Comey, deputy Director Andrew McCabe and lead “Crossfire Hurricane” investigator Peter Strzok dismiss it as such? They clearly knew it was a hoax. As retired FBI intelligence chief Kevin Brock says, “The fact pattern that John Durham is methodically establishing shows what James Comey and Andrew McCabe likely knew from Day One, that the Steele ‘dossier’ was politically-driven nonsense at the behest of the Clinton campaign. “And yet they knowingly ran with its false information to obtain legal process against an American citizen. They defrauded not just a federal court, they defrauded the FBI and the American people.”

He went on to say that this has destroyed trust in the FBI. “As Comey cashes his royalty checks from a book and a movie, where do everyday, working FBI agents go to get the Bureau’s reputation back? The damage done by Comey, McCabe and others to the trust that Americans have traditionally placed in the FBI is incalculable.”

Indeed, as the depth of this deceit becomes increasingly evident, there will no doubt be calls to dismantle the FBI and completely start over. I would say the person most qualified –- and motivated –- to restructure the intel bureaucracy might be none other than Mike Flynn. Now THAT would be justice.

I would also add that, in exploiting this fakery after Trump became President, it was THEY at the Justice Department –- as opposed to Trump supporters –- who were involved in a coup, ultimately engineered by Hillary Clinton and her allies. I hope this is where Durham is headed.

One defense the FBI will likely try, to defend itself against charges of corruption, is that this happened because of incompetent people at the top, but that doesn’t wash. As Solomon points out, one FBI official, Kevin Clinesmith, has already admitted doctoring a piece of evidence that was used to get the Carter Page warrant. And these people are highly skilled at protecting themselves legally. Recall that Comey even gave up his security clearance so he wouldn’t be able to testify about classified matters. Not so incompetent when it comes to covering his backside.

Former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes has known about the Clinton connection for years now. “We already knew the Steele ‘dossier’ was orchestrated and funded by the Democrats, and now we know that a Democrat operative, who’d been a registered Russian agent and was closely linked to Kremlin officials, served as a direct source for the dossier’s fabrications, he told JUST THE NEWS in a reference to Charles Dolan. “As I’ve said for years, the only people who colluded with Russians were the Democrats.”

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/clinton-operative-linked-to-steele-dossier-did-not-disclose-work-for-russia-to-justice-department/

As for Peter Strzok, he went on MSNBC Thursday and actually denied to Rachel Maddow that there was ever an FBI investigation of the Trump campaign, which is a blatant lie. (I assume he’d justify this statement by saying Carter Page was no longer with the Trump campaign when they got the warrant against him; this is a dodge that is easily dismantled.) He said that what “certain far-right commentators” are saying about that is “nonsense.”

Solomon just smiled and shook his head at this, saying that Strzok’s own original statement that started the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was that they were “looking at whether individuals associated with the Trump campaign were coordinating or conspiring with Russia.” The Trump campaign was mentioned a dozen times in the first FISA application, submitted in October of 2016 at the height of the campaign.

“He was lying the other night,” Solomon said. “There’s no other way to say it politely.”

Sara Carter, in an appearance this weekend on Steve Hilton’s FOX NEWS show THE NEXT REVOLUTION, brought up a couple of interesting facts we didn’t know about Fiona Hill, a star witness in Trump Impeachment #1. Not only did she introduce Igor Danchenko to Christopher Steele, but she also introduced Clinton crony Charles Dolan to Danchenko. All of these connections appear to center around the solidly anti-Trump “think-tank” the Brookings Institution, headed by big-time Clinton ally Strobe Talbott. Also, Hill was working closely at the time with H. R. McMaster, the person who replaced Michael Flynn as Trump’s new national security adviser after the FBI set Flynn up and destroyed his career. It seems that practically every day, there’s another puzzle piece or two to put in place.

Mike Huckabee

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez knows why Democrats were wiped out for the first time in years in Virginia: they just weren’t left-wing enough.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/rebeccadowns/2021/11/04/democrats-should-listen-to-aocs-take-on-virginia-election-if-they-want-to-keep-losing-n2598585?utm_campaign=rightrailsticky3

AOC said if only the candidates hadn’t moderated their stances so much, they would have energized the “progressive” base and won.

As usual with her statements, there are multiple layers of “flat wrong” in there. First of all, you can’t win an election just by turning out “progressives.” A July 2020 Gallup poll found that only 26% of Americans self-identify as “liberal.” Pew found that even among Democrats, only 47% describe themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal.” The majority say they’re either “moderate” or “conservative.” I know that math isn’t the strong point of socialists, but neither 26% nor 47% of half the population is a majority.

Also, Virginia’s new Attorney General-Elect Jason Miyares pointed out to Townhall.com that before the election, the House of Delegates was 55-45 Democrat, and they passed every piece of “progressive” nonsense that came in front of them, from “social justice” to the Green New Deal to gun control to unfettered abortion. Surely, that must’ve “energized” “progressives.” All 100 seats were up for reelection, and when the votes were counted, the House of Delegates had flipped Republican by 52-48.

So here’s the truth: it wasn’t that Democrats didn’t run far enough to the left. It’s that they governed far to the left, the people got a bellyful of that, and they turned out in droves to kick them out of office.

This is what comes from living in an impenetrable ideological bubble. You think your ideas are wildly popular, just because all the people you talk to like them.

Incidentally, if your brain is hurting from trying to analyze AOC’s explanation of the Virginia election, you may need a crate of Excedrin after hearing her explanation of why there’s inflation and why the cure is for the government to spend another $5 trillion at bare minimum.

https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2021/11/04/oh-honey-stop-aoc-uses-her-big-brain-and-econ-degree-to-explain-why-inflation-is-happening-in-a-thread-annnd-we-cant-even/

Mike Huckabee

Igor Danchenko, the Russian national living in the Washington DC area who was allegedly Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source for the fictional “dossier” –- in reality, opposition research funded by Hillary’s presidential campaign –- has been indicted by Special Counsel John Durham, who is looking into the origins of the Trump-Russia “collusion” scandal, otherwise known as the Trump-Russia HOAX or, as we like to call it, “My Big Fat Russia Conspiracy Theory.”

The Special Counsel seems to be very gradually and methodically connecting all the dots leading back to Hillary and her 2016 presidential campaign. As law professor Jonathan Turley said Thursday, “Danchenko’s arrest is a seismic development and confirmed Durham is far from done with his investigation.”

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/11/04/igor-danchenko-arrested-as-part-of-durham-investigation/

Danchenko has been charged with five counts of making false statements. According to Turley, he had told the FBI that Steele asked him to look for compromising material on Trump and also said the dossier was “unsubstantiated” (that part’s true). Danchenko had his own source for crazy dossier stories, and he’s listed anonymously in Durham’s indictment as “PR – Executive -1,” now confirmed to be a man named Charles Dolan, described by Turley as “a close Clinton adviser who had held high positions within the Democrat Party and prior Clinton campaigns.”

In fact, Dolan’s attorney, Ralph Martin, has come out and said Dolan is the PR executive. And it appears that Dolan had the very kind of contacts within the Russian government that Trump and his campaign were falsely accused of having. Joel B. Polack at BREITBART has more details from the indictment.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/11/04/confirmed-pr-executive-1-in-durham-indictment-docs-is-charles-dolan-jr/

Dolan apparently gifted Danchenko with an autobiography of Hillary Clinton, with the handwritten inscription, “To my good friend [Igor]. a great Democrat.” Dolan definitely fits the description; he has served “as chairman of a national Democratic political organization” and “state chairman of former President Clinton’s 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns,” as well as “adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.” He had also been appointed by President Bill Clinton to two four-year terms with an advisory commission at the State Department. During the 2016 Hillary campaign, he actively campaigned and participated in calls and events on behalf of Hillary Clinton.”

Turley thinks Danchenko is the sort of participant that prosecutors think they can “flip” to give information on the key players who used him in this effort. These might range from Steele himself to Clinton counsel Marc Elias to Clinton campaign officials.

Samuel Chamberlain at the NEW YORK POST calls Charles H. Dolan, Jr., “an elusive ally” of the Clintons. The charging document accuses Danchenko of intentionally misleading the FBI when he told them he hadn’t spoken to Dolan about any material in the Trump-Russia file.

https://nypost.com/2021/11/05/clinton-crony-charles-h-dolan-jr-takes-center-stage-in-latest-durham-indictment/

The evidence shows he had, though. In August of 2016, Danchenko emailed Dolan to say he was working on “a project against Trump” and to ask him for “any thought, rumor or allegation” (!) about Paul Manafort, who had recently resigned as Trump’s campaign chairman. Dolan emailed him back to dish some dirt that he said he got from former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski over a drink. That email appears almost verbatim in the Steele dossier.

But the indictment says that Dolan told the FBI that the “drink with a GOP friend” was made up, and that all he gave to Danchenko was gleaned from news reports.

Adam Goldman and Charlie Savage reported on the Danchenko indictment for THE NEW YORK TIMES.

https://archive.md/kGmqR

The dossier was intended to show that then-candidate Donald Trump was “colluding” with the Russian government for help in getting himself elected President. Nothing of consequence in Steele’s series of memos has ever been verified, but that didn’t stop Trump’s enemies from issuing hysterical made-up media reports in service to the hoax, some of which persist to this day.

Also, it was because of the Steele dossier that a FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) warrant was granted in October 2016 for the FBI to spy on Trump campaign adviser and American citizen Carter Page. Through him, they were able to spy on the entire campaign and even go ‘back in time’ to look at previous communications. And the fabricated contents, which included a salacious story involving Russian prostitutes at the Moscow Ritz-Carlton (we all know the one; it likely came from Dolan), were printed by BUZZFEED just days before Trump’s inauguration.

Though primary source Danchenko is Russian by birth, he resides in the Washington DC area and the material he related was thirdhand at best. The FBI knew after they interviewed him that his “information” was not necessarily true, but they went with it anyway, after Hillary’s attorney’s pressured them from every side.

According to the NYT, a “Justice” Department inspector general report from 2019 sharply criticized the FBI “for continuing to cite material from the dossier after the Bureau interviewed Mr. Danchenko without alerting judges that some of what he had said had cast doubt on the contents of the dossier.”

Danchenko was also interviewed by the NYT, and said that he had been tasked only with providing “raw” information to Steele. He apparently has been investigated to see if he’s a Russian agent, but he denies that strongly.

As the NYT reports –- they must be trying to get ahead of this story –- “Mr. Steele’s business intelligence firm was a subcontractor to another research firm, Fusion GPS, which in turn had been hired by the Perkins Coie law firm, which was working for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Mr. Danchenko said he was not aware of who Steele’s client was at the time and considered himself a “nonpartisan analyst and researcher.”

But Danchenko worked for the extremely anti-Trump “think-tank” the Brookings Institution from 2005 to 2010. Last February, Durham used a subpoena to retrieve from there his old personnel files and related documents. If you have time, it’s interesting to see what the NYT reporters wrote about that back in April.

https://archive.md/N8m90

TOWNHALL also reported Danchenoko's indictment.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/11/04/igor-danchenko-n2598565

Finally, recall that the person who apparently introduced Danchenko to Steele was...(drum roll, please)...“Trump impeachment star” Fiona Hill. REDSTATE reported this back in January. But they assumed this story would go away; they weren’t counting on Durham piecing it all together.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/01/22/shocker-impeachment-star-lied-about-her-contacts-with-christopher-steele-n314409

Mike Huckabee

Winsome Sears is a name we’ll be hearing a lot more in the coming days and years, now that she’s won the 2021 race for Lt. Governor in Virginia and shown herself to be the most refreshing spokesperson in America on the issue of race. Leftists, better sit down: she did it by saying we need to think a lot LESS about race. You folks at CNN and MSNBC who talk compulsively in terms of “dog whistles” (which only you hear) and “code” (which only you recognize) will probably not have her as a guest very often, as she will good-naturedly wipe the floor with you every time.

https://waynedupree.com/2021/11/winsome-sears-jemele-hill/

Sears is black and makes it clear she “identifies” as black, having immigrated legally to the U.S. from Jamaica at age 6, in 1963 when the Civil Rights Movement was still raging. But today, she clearly sees the damage caused by the relentless emphasis on race. “We’re framing too many issues in terms of race and it just continues to divide us,” she told FOX NEWS’ Martha MacCallum on Wednesday. “And, unfortunately, politicians are using it as a tool because of the things that have happened to us historically to advance, I would think, their nefarious purposes.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/winsome-sears-virginia-election-race

“In case you haven’t noticed, I am black,” she said in her speech to introduce Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin early Wednesday. “And I have been black all my life, but that’s not what this is about.” Yes, she's the first black woman to win statewide office in Virginia, but that’s not the way she wants to think of this achievement. “I didn’t run to make history,” she said. “I just wanted to make it better than I found it. And with your help, I’m going to do that.”

Stop looking at race, she says, and start looking at people. “I didn’t do anything special to get here except stay in school and study,” she told MacCallum. She's right; that’s the best advice any young person could get. Success is just being in America and taking advantage of the opportunities here.

One way she did that was to join the U.S. Marine Corps. “When I joined the Marine Corps, I was still a Jamaican,” she said. (She was 19 then and became a U.S. citizen one year later.) “But this country had done so much for me I was willing to die for tis country.”

Later, when she wanted to attend college but had three children under age 5, she was just determined, even putting one of her kids on the back of her bicycle with her to get to class, and she earned a masters degree in organizational leadership from Regent University. Before she got into politics, winning a term from 2002 to 2004 in Virginia’s House of Delegates --- the first black Republican woman and first naturalized citizen to do so, and the first Republican to win a majority-black district since 1865 --- she was the director of a Salvation Army homeless shelter. She also led a men’s prison ministry.

After leaving politics, she became the owner of an appliance and plumbing repair store in Virginia –- having learned electronics in the Marines –- and also served as vice president of the Virginia Board of Education. Her run for lieutenant governor this year marks her return to politics after almost two decades.

“America allowed me to come and do for myself and my family,” she said. “No one can say to me I don’t know what it is to be poor. You’re looking at the American Dream.”

“We’re always going to have problems,” she said. “I understand that. I’m not saying we’re perfect. But you can see those people at the border right now trying to get in. They’re dying to get in because they know if they can put a foot on American soil, the trajectory of their lives will change just as it did for my father.”

She noted that times have changed since her father arrived here with $1.75 in his pocket. “There are some who want to divide us and we must not let that happen,” she said in her speech. “They would like us to believe that we are back in 1963 when my father came.” But we’re not. “I’m living proof,” she said.

On “FOX & Friends” early Wednesday morning, before her win was official, she showed herself to be a good spokesperson for those of faith as well, calling her projected win “a God thing.” She said she had little money, a ragtag staff, and was outspent and “outgunned, if you will.” And yet it happened.

Speaking of guns, we linked yesterday to a picture of Sears looking every bit the Marine, confidently carrying her AR-15 at a target range last April. If you missed it, here it is.

https://twitter.com/CarmineSabia/status/1455717349265494020?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1455717349265494020%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.foxnews.com%2Fpolitics%2Fwinsome-sears-victory-speech-usa-chant-virginia

Gun-control activists in Virginia have been trying since 2019 to put in place new restrictions on “assault” weapons, but the win by this strong 2nd Amendment advocate does not reflect positively on their chances.

During her campaign, she advocated for increasing pay for teachers and law enforcement, cutting taxes and expanding veteran care centers. And even though she de-emphasizes race in our political dialogue, she also said she’d push for the creation of a Black Virginians Advisory Cabinet for the governor and for a “once-in-a generation investment” in historically black colleges and universities.

Here are a few more details about this rising star, from her campaign website.

https://winsomesears.com/about/

One of the best profiles we’ve found of her was written by Eleanor Vaughn for AMAC, the Association of Mature American Citizens, in September, as the campaign was in full swing.

https://amac.us/for-winsome-sears-making-history-is-second-nature/

Here’s another good one, which mentions that Sears actually is dismayed by the dismantling of Confederate statues. “The curious thing,” she said, “is that I have spoken to enough black people, and what they’re telling me is they wanted the statues up, so that they could talk to their children about who this person was, what they did, what they didn’t do.” (See, it’s as Trump said: there ARE “fine people” on both sides of the statues argument.)

https://clarion.causeaction.com/2021/11/03/i-have-had-white-liberals-talk-down-to-me/

Incidentally, the Squad completely ignored the win by THIS black female. Surprised?

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/squad-members-silent-winsome-sears-historic-win-virginia

At this writing, Sean Hannity’s Wednesday TV interview of Sears had not yet been posted, but I hope you'll check it out. Her words to Democrats not telling her how to vote because she’s black are magnificent.

Sears definitely has a sassy side. Here she is in a tweet spoofing Kamala Harris shortly she and Joe Biden were elected. And yes, “based” is a compliment, and it fits. It means to have some swagger, to not care much what others think.

https://dailycaller.com/2021/11/03/winsome-sears-kamala-harris-virginia-glenn-youngkin/

This one is a hoot as well.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/winsome-sears-trolls-the-lincoln-project-virginia

No, Sears is not a natural-born U.S. citizen, but perhaps someday we’ll be considering the repeal of that one qualification for President. Hey, she wasn’t born here, but she got here as fast as she could. Congratulations, Winsome Sears.

Mike Huckabee

Tuesday was a good day for Republicans, America, parents and the Atlanta Braves. It was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day for Democrats, President Biden, arrogant educrats, pushers of racist Critical Race Theory, leftist celebrities, Major League Baseball virtue signalers, and the anchors of MSNBC, whose on-air meltdowns attracted so many gleeful conservative viewers that it probably gave them their first ratings boost since Trump left office. Jonah Goldberg tweeted that it was “pretty wild” seeing them try to claim that all these Virginia voters who voted for Biden by ten points a year ago are now “idiots, racists and/or dupes.” I look forward to the inevitable YouTube compilation videos.

At this writing, Terry McAuliffe has finally conceded to Republican Glenn Youngkin in the Virginia Governor’s race (guess Marc Elias won’t have to “find” a truckload of “mail-in ballots”) in a state that Biden won by 10 points last year. In an even bigger shocker that nobody saw coming, New Jersey Republican Jack Ciatarrelli is one-tenth of a point ahead of incumbent Democrat Gov. Phil “I’ll hit you with the vaccine mandates after I’m reelected” Murphy, whom the polls had leading by 11 points. Of course, that race could change as the count continues, or if someone pops open a car trunk, rolls a body aside and pulls out a few ballot boxes.

But while those races are still nailbiters, there was good news up and down ballots at all levels and across the nation. It’s such good news that political analyst Larry Sabato ruefully described it as a “blood bath” for Democrats.

For instance, Virginia will now have its first black female Lieutenant Governor in Marine veteran Winsome Sears (a Republican), who’s also the first black woman ever to be elected statewide in Virginia – although she says this isn’t about race, it’s about the American Dream. You have to read about her victory speech and see her photo at the link. I think you’ll fall in love.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/winsome-sears-victory-speech-usa-chant-virginia

The state will also have its first Hispanic Attorney General in Jason Miyares, who is Cuban-American and also a Republican. So if it’s true, as Democrats claimed, that the Republicans were running solely to promote racism, then they must be as bad at white supremacy as the Democrats are at everything else.

Ben Shapiro had the best tweet on that: “Condolences to VA on becoming radically racist again, according to the media...by electing a black female lieutenant governor and a Cuban-American attorney general, rejecting racial essentialism in schools, and replacing a Dem governor who wore an actual KKK outfit.”

https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1455712734700527617

Republicans also retained Ohio’s 15th Congressional District seat, when Trump-endorsed Mike Carey defeated Biden-endorsed Allison Russo in a landslide. But the Democrats retained the heavily-blue 11th District seat, so this won’t change the balance in Congress.

In another shocker, the media retracted its victory calls for three entrenched Democrat Assembly members in New Jersey after deciding it was too close to call between them and their underfunded challengers: an EMT, a Realtor and a truck driver. And by “underfunded,” I mean truck driver Edward Durr may unseat the state Senate president with a campaign that cost him less than $200.

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/11/03/nj-3rd-district-n2598490

One of the lowest-level races produced one of the most satisfying results. In Braintree, Massachusetts, Matthew Lynch was forced to resign from his job as a school teacher after what he calls a “digital lynch mob” posted photos of him at the Capitol on January 6th and smeared him as a domestic terrorist. It even resulted in a visit from the FBI. Tuesday, the military veteran and former teacher was elected to the Braintree school board.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/ma-teacher-forced-resign-attending-jan-6-protest-wins-school-board-seat/

The anti-Biden/Democrat overreach/CRT groundswell is good news for all America because of the potential chilling effect it could put on the “progressives’” mad march to try to shove through “fundamentally transformative” legislation with a tiny House majority and a tie Senate. Even former Obama adviser David Axelrod admitted that seeing such a massive grassroots rejection of the leftist agenda, including in blue states, could be making Democrats who are up for reelection 2022 in swing districts rethink their votes on Biden’s big government spending bill.

https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2021/11/02/axelrod-if-i-were-in-w-h-dem-leadership-id-worry-about-dems-in-swing-districts-re-considering-reconciliation-bill/

Some of the victories in Tuesday’s elections weren’t wins for Republicans, since there are so few of them in certain places, but at least wins for sanity. For instance, in Minneapolis, 57% of voters rejected an Ilhan Omar-backed move to dismantle the police department and replace it with a vague “Public Safety Department” that would be under the control of the same mayor and city council responsible for the precipitous decline in public safety. George Soros’ laughably-named “Open Policy Center” (should be called “Open Borders and Jails Center”) pumped $650,000 into pushing that measure, and I can’t think of anyone whose money I’d rather see wasted.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/minneapolis-police-ballot-measure

All the votes have yet to be counted in Seattle, but more moderate, pro-business and pro-police candidates have what appear to be massive, insurmountable leads over far-left, “defund the police” candidates. They include Mayoral candidate Bruce Harrell, who at this writing has a 30-point lead over “progressive” council president Lorena Gonzalez. So cutting the police and allowing your city to be burned and looted, crime to skyrocket, and Antifa radicals to take over a large piece of the city while you describe that as a “summer of love” wasn’t popular with voters? Who could’ve predicted that?

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/progressives-on-the-ropes-five-takeaways-from-seattles-election-night-returns/

And in Buffalo, New York, Democrat Mayor Byron Brown lost to AOC-backed socialist India Walton in the Democratic primary, but he refused to give in and waged a successful write-in campaign. With 97% of precincts reporting, 41% of the vote was for Walton while 59% were write-in votes. Brown declared victory, but the write-in votes still have to be checked to make sure they’re for him (Who else? Trump?) But of course, Walton is still refusing to concede. As a good socialist, she assumes his write-in votes belong to her.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/11/02/buffalo-mayor-declares-victory-in-write-in-campaign-against-aoc-backed-democratic-socialist/

By the way, have you noticed that when Republicans question an election, it’s an assault on democracy; but when Democrats refuse to accept an election result, they’re protecting the right of every voter to have a voice?

It’s good to see Democrats finally getting “woke” to how the far left has hijacked their primary process, and starting to fight back. These often Soros-backed candidates target safe blue districts and run stealth campaigns in primaries in which most voters assume the incumbent is a shoo-in, so they don’t bother to vote. This is how cities end up with DA’s who refuse to prosecute criminals, and it’s how we got AOC in Congress (even though he could’ve run and won, the incumbent refused to challenge her for “the good of the party,” but it doesn’t seem to have done his party or America much good, has it?)

I’m a Republican, but if we have to have some Democrats in office, let’s at least get back to electing reasonable ones, not America-hating, socialist nutjobs.

Mike Huckabee

Paul Sperry has a tremendous new update on the investigation into the 2016 Clinton-initiated Alfa Bank hoax. For all the details, you can go to his article at REAL CLEAR INVESTIGATIONS at the link, but we’ll summarize and comment at length here.

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/10/28/clinton_campaign_spread_bogus_alfa_bank_story_obama_admin-wide_to_press_trump-russia_probe_800927.html

Sperry’s sources who have been briefed on special counsel John Durham’s ongoing investigation say the scheme was much broader than previously known and involved “multiple U.S. agencies.” Newly declassified documents suggest the same thing. Seriously, is anyone surprised by this?

Hillary’s campaign, led by then-Perkins Coie attorneys Michael Sussmann and Marc Elias, worked to convince Obama’s State Department (formerly run by Hillary), FBI/Justice (“Justice”) Department and even CIA to look into the hoax, and kept the pressure on even after Trump was inaugurated in 2017. The Clinton machine just kept pushing and pushing from a variety of angles. “The deception was wide-ranging,” Sperry’s briefed source told him.

(NOTE: We generally are wary of anonymous sources, but Sperry has been consistently right, and sources concerning an ongoing investigation have to remain anonymous. We have never been steered wrong by Paul Sperry.)

Durham’s “speaking indictment” of Sussmann deals with his prodding of the FBI to investigate the false Trump Tower/Alfa Bank “pinging” story and implies a great deal about how that was set up. Durham has emails that show the Clinton campaign knew that this story was a “red herring” but fed it to the FBI anyway as “a very useful narrative.” One of the researchers said “we’d have to expose every trick we have in our bag to make even a very weak association...We cannot technically make any claims that would fly public scrutiny.” But that didn’t stop them from doing it.

What’s new is that after Sussmann approached the FBI with their fake story in September of 2016, as detailed in the “speaking indictment,” the campaign then approached the State Department with the same story, this time from “dossier” imagineer Christopher Steele. Two days later (by now we’re in mid-October), his contact sent the information to the FBI’s top Eurasia/Russia counterintel official, Stephen Laycock. Laycock sent it to...(drum roll, please)...Peter Strzok, plus another supervisor.

At this point, the FBI acted on the flimsy rumors, interviewing tech vendors who worked for the Trump Organization and actually obtaining warrants to search the Trump Tower servers. It was days after this tip that Strzok used the “dossier” to get the warrant to spy on Carter Page.

Clinton foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan, who is Biden’s national security adviser now, was apparently in charge of the narrative, and he released a written statement about the Trump/Alfa Bank story. SLATE reported it, after being pressured by Hillary-funded Fusion GPS to do so. Then Hillary tweeted Sullivan’s statement on October 31, just days before the election. Her lead line was totally made up: “Computer scientists have apparently uncovered a covert server linking the Trump Organization to a Russia-based bank.”

After Donald Trump shocked the pants off them all in November by winning the election, the Clinton people doubled down on their hoax. (Really, after all that effort, why let a good hoax go to waste? It’s not as if they were going to accept the results of the election.) It was in mid-November that they went back to the State Department, where Bruce Ohr, wife of Fusion GPS researcher Nellie Orh, was a top official. Ohr gave the FBI two thumb drives he had received from Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson and quoted his (Clinton) sources as saying the Trump/Alfa Bank story was real.

As Paul Sperry reports, the FBI finally closed their case after finding no basis for the claim, but THEN...Sussmann, again without revealing his Clinton ties, took it to the CIA, to John Brennan’s general counsel. (This is like a Tale from the Crypt –- the thing that wouldn’t die. And now we know why Durham also accuses Sussmann of misleading “Agency -2,” the CIA.) Then the CIA schlepped it to another FBI liaison, who appears to have been...(drum roll, please)...Peter Strzok. Yes, again.

In a new court document filed this past week, Durham revealed that he now has over 80,000 pages of documents in response to grand jury subpoenas issued to more than 15 targets and witnesses, including the computer contractors he enlisted from Georgia Tech. Sperry’s sources tell him that some of these witnesses have been granted immunity and are cooperating.

The CIA isn’t supposed to be involved in domestic political issues at all --- that must be why they passed the story back to the FBI to do the dirty work and damage Trump. As Jonathan Turley said, “One would expect a CIA official to express reluctance in an investigation that would have largely a domestic focus. But as with the FBI, the Clinton campaign found eager officials to move on any such allegation.”

Jake Sullivan kept at it, too. In February of 2017, he teamed with Glenn Simpson and Daniel Jones, an FBI agent-turned Democrat-operative whose name no doubt will become increasingly familiar, to breathe new life into the story. Sullivan is under scrutiny for lying to Congress about his role in this. Jones reached out to his former FBI colleagues, who, unbelievably, re-opened the Trump-Alfa Bank case even though they had originally found nothing to them.

They went BACK to the building that housed the Trump server in question, Examination showed the “pings” between Tower and Alfa Bank to be nothing but...spam marketing emails.

This was all an investigation about nothing. So, of course, the FBI and the media immediately announced that there was nothing to the Trump-Alfa Bank story and apologized profusely to President Trump for their mistake. Haha, I'm kidding.

Strzok has tried to distance himself from the Trump-Alfa Bank story and complained in LAWFARE that Durham is conducting “a partisan witch hunt on behalf of Trump.” To that I’d sat that Trump deserves vindication, and Durham’s hunt seems to be turning up quite a few actual witches.

……………….

Jonathan Turley wrote on his website back in September about the “journalist” who wrote the first media piece about the (fake) Trump Tower-Alfa Bank connection, Franklin Foer. Durham’s “speaking indictment” tells how Fusion GPS pressured him to publish it. “The Investigative Firm’s Employee’s email stated ‘time to hurry’ suggesting that Reporter -2 should hurry to publish an article regarding the Russian Bank -1 allegations. In response, Reporter – 2 emailed to the Investigative Firm Employee a draft article regarding the Russian Bank -1 allegations, along with the cover message: Here’s the first 2500 words.”

It’s clear that In the end, Foer took his chances with a flimsy story because he didn’t want to see Trump elected. Remember this next time you see any other anti-Trump or anti-conservative hit piece in the mainstream media. They’ve lost whatever credibility they might have ever had.

Mike Huckabee

You’ve heard all the caterwauling from the left over a Southwest Airlines pilot allegedly saying, “Let’s Go, Brandon” (the euphemism for a strong diss of President Biden), over a plane’s intercom. The outrage mob is shaking their flaming torches at Southwest’s executives. Their groveling apology isn’t enough! This pilot must be identified, fired, pilloried, shamed and barred from ever working again for committing the unpardonable thought crime of expressing an opinion that intolerant leftists disagree with (and according to polling, a majority of regular Americans wholeheartedly endorse.)

Well, there might be a problem: it’s possible nobody ever actually said that. And the “journalist” who claimed to be on the plane and to have heard it claimed it happened on October 29th, which turns out to be 18 days after the alleged audio of it was posted on social media.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/robert-spencer/2021/11/01/the-southwest-airlines-lets-go-brandon-narrative-may-be-crashing-and-burning-as-we-speak-n1528604

So it’s possible that the left is acting like their hair is on fire over a complete hoax, which would make “Southwest Brandon-gate” the latest version of “Russian Collusion”-gate.

Incidentally, I’d like to highlight the very telling comment in that linked story from a triggered leftist on Twitter: “This pilot is encouraging violence against flight attendants with this statement.”

PJ Media’s Robert Spencer notes how they’re trying to equate all conservative speech with violence. But I’d like to ask another question: if simply hearing the pilot say “Let’s Go, Brandon” would spark someone to commit violence against a flight attendant, who, exactly, would be committing that violence? Surely not conservatives. And how would mindless violence from leftists who go into a rage and attack innocent people just because they heard a differing political viewpoint be the fault of the pilot?

Seriously, is there any point at all at which these people become responsible for their own behavior?

Mike Huckabee

Let me explain something to Democrats in Washington: when the states act as laboratories for new ideas, you’re supposed to take only the successful experiments to adopt as national policies, not the failed ones. Yet California’s AB-5 law that’s killing the gig economy and worsening the supply chain crisis appears in a national version in Biden’s $3.5 trillion spendapaloosa bill.

And now, after leftwing district attorneys did away with cash bail and started letting criminals go free – which has contributed to a huge spike in crime in blue cities – President Biden announced that he plans to take that national, too, and ban setting cash bail for violent criminals.

https://redstate.com/andrewmalcolm/2021/10/27/joe-biden-to-ban-cash-bail-for-violent-criminals-in-the-interest-of-equity-you-see-n464151

This is tucked into his new 42-page National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, which has to be the most obvious attempt at distraction from what’s really going on since magicians discovered scantily-clad female assistants. Heaven knows, America has no pressing problems that need to be addressed, so it’s time for Biden and his cohorts to focus like a laser beam on “gender equity.”

By the way, part of the connection made between “criminal justice reform” (i.e., legalizing crime and letting criminals run amok) and “gender equity” is that violent crime against trans people is up. Yes, but that’s mostly because, thanks to these Bozos, violent crime against everyone is up. Murder is up 30% (35% in large cities), in the wake of leftist politicians releasing criminals while defunding the police. It’s the biggest annual increase in murders in 30 years.

Of course, Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is the living embodiment of this insane crime-superspreader policy, is now blaming the rise in violent crime on the police. Rep. Dan Crenshaw summed up her lunacy perfectly in one tweet:

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/481461/

Mike Huckabee

If you express any doubts that the 2020 election was the most honest, fair, perfect election in history, you get accused of spreading “disinformation” and promoting a “Big Lie.” We all know there’s no such thing as election fraud and it’s practically treasonous to say there is, unless you’re talking about how the Russians cheated Hillary out of the Presidency in 2016, or how Stacey Abrams is the real Governor of Georgia, or…well, basically, any race that the Democrats lost.

https://www.westernjournal.com/poll-35-voters-say-2020-election-overturned/

But the strategy of demonizing skeptics while moving heaven and earth to keep anyone from looking at the evidence doesn’t seem to be winning over everyone. A new Politico/Morning Consult poll found that 35% of registered voters think the Trump/Biden election results should be overturned. That includes 58% of Republicans and 14% of Democrats.

Still, I suspect there’s an aspect of this that has nothing to do with whether people believe the 2020 vote was rigged. I believe a lot of people just think that, honest or not, electing Biden was a big mistake and we need a do-over, stat. That’s supported by a Rasmussen survey from August that found that if the election were held today, Trump would win.

https://www.westernjournal.com/trump-win-election-held-today-majority-americans-blame-biden-afghanistan-poll/

It also found that 9% of Democrats regretted their vote for Biden, and things haven’t exactly been looking up since August. The story about the new Politico poll states that “only” 14% of Democrat voters want to overturn the 2020 election, but what does it say about how well Biden is doing his job that 14% of his voters want to overturn an election that their candidate won?

Mike Huckabee

Election Day for the Virginia gubernatorial race, and for other down-ballot votes as well, is this coming Tuesday, November 2, and the stakes could hardly be higher –- or the choice clearer. Earlier in the week, our commentary on the lurking presence in Virginia of DNC lawyer/activist and infamous election manipulator Marc Elias drew quite a bit of reader response.

You know, it’s impossible for me to respond to every letter --- even though they’re all read --- but now and then it’s instructive to respond to a particular letter for a particular reason. That’s the case with the following letter from Carol, because of one thing she said about the election that really stood out and makes a timely response critical before Election Day. Read her letter and see if you can pick out the part I mean. Then I’ll explain what the very important issue is.

From Carol (with slight editing):

I am in Georgia. Wherever Stacey Abrams goes, the laws are broken. This is what she advocated and got done in Georgia for the 2020 election. She is in Virginia now and the [requirement for the] last four digits of [a voter’s] Social Security number has been deleted even though it is the law there.

This is how it is done and how the election was stolen in 2020, and unless it is stopped, 2022 and 2024 will go the way of 2020. They only win by changing the laws to suit their outcome. Many understand this and will not vote because they say and believe it is rigged. Even the Supreme Court are cowards in taking up the suits that would have proven that.

...Keep America sick and mail-in ballots will again be the next way votes are stolen and elections rigged.

From the Gov:

Thank you for writing, Carol. Yes, we discussed some of the recent changes to the voting laws in Virginia --- also the fact that it’s illegal for the government to ignore laws it doesn’t want to enforce. Marc Elias and Stacey Abrams make quite a team, don’t they?

Another good point is that as long as state and county officials can use COVID-19 as an excuse for mass mail-in voting, cheating will be easy and largely undetectable. And their hope is that we’ll get so used to the convenience of just mailing in our ballots, most people will prefer that whether COVID is still a major concern or not. But we need to do what the French did in 1975 after seeing the fraud caused by mail-in voting: scrap it except on a limited basis, by request when people have a legitimate reason for not being able to get to the polls. That will not happen in battleground states until they’re run by people who don’t want to keep their thumb on the election scales. Those people must be voted out.

That brings me to the part of the letter that has to be addressed. Did you guess it? “MANY...WILL NOT VOTE BECAUSE THEY...BELIEVE THE VOTE IS RIGGED.”

If enough Republicans stay home to make the margin of victory, say, 300 votes instead of 30,000, how much easier have we made it for Democrats to cheat? Cheaters love close races; it’s much harder to see big statistical anomalies and much easier to “find” the relatively small number of votes they need. It’s clear this is what happened in Georgia’s last senatorial election; fed-up Republicans stayed home and let their opponents just take it. We blew our chance to temper the Biden administration with a Republican-led Senate just because some Republicans sat on their hands.

Conversely, it might seem impossible to stop cheaters, but one way to do it is to turn out in such large numbers that they can’t make up the difference with fake votes. It has to be a blowout.

Anyone thinking of sitting out this or any other Election Day had better realize: you are doing exactly what the opposition wants you to. They want you to give up, to resign yourself to the fate they are choosing for you. Don’t do it. Instead, do the opposite of what they want.

It’s kind of a catch: in order to fix the cheating, we have to win in spite of the cheating! I know that seems overwhelming, but if conservative turnout is high enough, it will happen. (I would think that this time, all the justifiably angry parents in Virginia could really make the difference.) Once we’re in, then we work state-by-state to reform the system. Yes, Democrats will fight us every step of the way, so, as I said in speaking of Marc Elias, our lawyers have to be better than their lawyers. And they have to be everywhere.

But polls show conclusively that most Americans want accurate and honest elections. As Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, said, “Voters want it to be easy to vote, but also hard to cheat.” It has become ridiculously easy to vote, and easy to cheat, too. Half the country has lost faith in our elections. If that half of the country stays home on Election Day, the other half wins by default.

As Mollie Hemingway says in RIGGED, “The left’s path to future victory requires it to cow its opposition into silence...A growing number of Americans are outraged by the way the left seizes and deploys power. They are sick of the lies, manipulation, and distortion that a corrupt ruling class spins on a regular basis. Those courageous citizens, not the decaying establishment, will determine the fate of the nation.”

Carol, I want to thank you for writing, because you reminded me, however inadvertently, of something I'd really wanted to mention before Tuesday’s election. Virginians, no matter how you feel about what the left has done to corrupt the system, it is critical that you turn out and vote! Get everyone you know to the polls. Start the red wave.

I’ll close with some good news from John Solomon on the election reform front. In the wake of the Maricopa County audit report –- which was quite bad despite the media’s sugar-coat –- the demand for 2020 forensic audits in all 50 states is gaining support, now up to 38 states, with 150 state legislators signing an open letter to that effect. (Note: I think they’d have more participation if they didn’t call for decertifications as well; the emphasis needs to be on forensic analysis and reform of the system for future elections.) Here’s an excerpt:

“In addition to Arizona, sworn affidavits have accumulated from many states detailing rampant corruption and mismanagement in the election process...We have come to the conclusion that all 50 states need to be forensically audited. Voter rolls should be scrubbed with a canvass of the voters to ensure future integrity of our elections...We call on each state to decertify its electors where it has been shown the elections were certified prematurely and inaccurately.”

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/mondemand-forensic-audits-2020-election-all-50-states-rapidly-gaining?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ncl_amplify&utm_campaign=20211027-icymi_demand_for_forensic_audits_of_2020_election_in_all_50_states_rapidly_gaining_support&utm_content=ncl-pKbnkrVuqc&_nlid=pKbnkrVuqc&_nsid=657c642b-1e87-46f9-8a9b-7fec2b0cc2e3

In fact, a problematic audit report in Wisconsin has prompted the state senate to launch its own investigation of the 2020 election in that state.

https://justthenews.com/nation/states/wisconsin-senate-launch-new-2020-election-investigation?utm_medium=email&utm_source=ncl_amplify&utm_campaign=20211027-icymi_wisconsin_senate_to_launch_its_own_2020_election_investigation&utm_content=ncl-DAMjbDkkhC&_nlid=DAMjbDkkhC&_nsid=8804c76d-5af8-4c94-acf5-152ce9d0ca7a

Mike Huckabee

Who thinks Nancy Pelosi’s “9/11-style commission” to investigate what happened on Capitol Hill last January 6 is actually there to fact-find? Me, neither. But I’ll tell you who's doing some first-rate investigation and reporting on the security breach at the Capitol building, and it’s not congressional Democrats or this administration’s Department of “Justice.”

It’s REVOLVER NEWS. But what they seem to be uncovering does not fit with the narrative Democrats want to maintain. In fact, it’s what they want to hide.

An Arizona man named Ray Epps, a Marine sergeant allegedly involved in the group the Oath Keepers, clearly was acting as a provocateur the evening before the rally. According to the REVOLVER report, “...Epps was insistent that everyone stay focused on a common mission: storming the Capitol. On multiple livestreams, Epps moves from group to group throughout the plaza barging in and insisting everyone ‘stay focused’ on ‘what we’re here for’ --- which he would then explain meant going inside the U.S. Capitol building. When asked to give a reason for his crazy plot, Epps would continually fall back on his catch-all rationale: ‘It’s about the Constitution.’” People in a couple of the groups he gave his little pep talk to even suggested that he might be “a Fed.”

You’d think that if the FBI were rounding up suspects to hold them for many months without bail, essentially as political prisoners, one person very close to the top of their list, if not THE top, would be this guy. But no. They had him on their “most wanted” list for a while, but when REVOLVER NEWS came out with their first big story, he was dropped off the list.

Not only did the FBI do that, but the day after REVOLVER ran another story on Stuart Rhodes, also of the Oath Keepers, they scrubbed Epps’ face from their database. Rhodes, like Epps, remains unindicted to this day, while others who might have just walked into the Capitol Building to take a selfie are languishing in solitary, some reportedly unable even to talk with their attorneys.

The videos of Epps, seen pretty widely on Twitter, show him talking with Trump supporters the evening of January 5, repeatedly encouraging them to enter the Capitol Building the day of the rally. He’s saying in a voice that cuts through the background noise, “I don’t even like to say it because I’ll be arrested. I’ll say it. We need to go into the Capitol.”

And now, the irony is that Epps seems to be one of relatively few people identified as having been involved in the security breach who WEREN’T arrested. But also unindicted are people who worked with him the day of the rally to, in the words of the REVOLVER team, “carry out a breach of the police barricades that induced a subsequent flood of unsuspecting MAGA protesters to unwittingly trespass on Capitol restricted grounds and place themselves in legal jeopardy.”

To give a little perspective, Epps was not even arrested, while another Oath Keeper, a Green Beret veteran named Jeremy Brown, is even now behind bars, bail denied until trial, simply for standing 100 feet too close to the Capitol steps. It hardly seems possible that the government isn’t protecting Epps.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie asked Attorney General Merrick Garland about Epps’ activities during Garland’s recent hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, playing some of the video for him of Epps talking up the idea of going inside the Capitol. Unfortunately, it was played on a very small screen that Rep, Massie was holding, but the audio of Epps telling people they need to go inside the Capitol the next day is unmistakable.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/10/21/rep_thomas_massie_to_ag_garland_are_you_concerned_about_the_presence_of_federal_agents_or_assets_at_january_6_riot.html

Massie informed Garland that the same person who was doing this the night before the rally was actually directing people to the Capitol during the rally. Then he asked Garland if he –- after “one of the most sweeping investigations in history,” as Garland had called it –- had seen this video. Garland avoided the question with the old “we don’t comment on pending investigations” dodge. His deflection did have an extra dash of creativity, though, with Garland also saying it’s one of the “norms” of the Justice Department not to comment on “particular scenes or particular individuals.”

“I was hoping today to give you an opportunity to put to rest the concerns that people have that there were federal agents or assets of the federal government present on January 5 and January 6,” Massie said to Garland. “Can you tell us without talking about particular videos how many agents or assets of the government were present on January 6? Whether they agitated to go into the Capitol? And if any of them did?”

Garland would not address this at all. “I’m not going to violate this norm of the rule of law,” he said. “I’m not going to comment on investigation that’s ongoing.”

If Garland had wanted to allay Republicans’ concerns that the feds might have actively encouraged Trump supporters to breach the Capitol building, this would have been the perfect time to do it, with a denial. On the other hand, if Epps and others actually were working undercover as agents to make sure the “insurrection” happened, the excuse Garland cited would be a very convenient “norm” indeed.

For when you have time, REVOLVER NEWS has put together an amazing piece of investigative journalism. It’s quite long and detailed, but highly recommended. (If it’s too exhaustive, at least skip down to the conclusion.) I’ll just tell you that Ray Epps is not the only one who played an extremely active role in the breach but was mysteriously never arrested. To cite another striking example, another Marine veteran, still unidentified but called “MaroonPB,” was going around using the same “It’s about the Constitution” line as Epps did. He also removed barricades and entered Senate offices during the breach itself, armed with bear mace. No arrest for him. Not even an identification, though he is maskless and beautifully photographed, in such a way that shows off his distinctive knuckle tattoos.

The team at REVOLVER NEWS say they're just getting started. Look at everything they’ve uncovered so far, and it suggests the FBI has a way of actually becoming the thing it purportedly hates. In this case, it might even have caused, or helped cause, the Trump “insurrection” narrative needed so desperately by leftists to prime Trump for impeachment #2 and tar his supporters as "domestic terrorists." (Note: that does NOT excuse the Trump supporters who got swept into it and caused incalculable damage to the conservative cause.) We know the FBI helped fake the Russia Hoax; who knows what else they might have faked?

https://www.revolver.news/2021/10/meet-ray-epps-the-fed-protected-provocateur-who-appears-to-have-led-the-very-first-1-6-attack-on-the-u-s-capitol/

Mike Huckabee

Many people are risking their careers by refusing to obey COVID vaccine mandates. For this, they’re being mocked, shunned and vilified (the Prime Minister of New Zealand is even bragging about how she’s used vaccine documents to create a two-tiered society that relegates the unvaccinated to second-class citizen status.)

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/leahbarkoukis/2021/10/25/new-zealand-pm-n2597952

So why are so many people saying no? Are they really all just ignorant, anti-science rubes, as some in the media or the Administration depict them? If so, how does that square with the fact that people with Ph.D.’s are among the most vaccine hesitant, or with all the health care workers who are refusing the jab (PR tip: if you want people to take something, don’t call it “the JAB.”)

The Epoch Times did something that few if any media outlets have done: they actually asked health care professionals why they are risking their careers to defy vaccine mandates.The full article is for paid subscribers only, but here’s the gist of what they said:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_morningbrief/health-care-workers-speak-out-on-why-they-would-rather-lose-their-jobs-than-take-a-covid-19-vaccine_4065164.html

Some are pro-life and have religious objections to the use of fetal cells in developing the vaccines. Others said they’ve personally seen many serious negative reactions and don’t believe they’re being honestly reported. One registered nurse in Oncology/Hematology says they’re seeing an increase in hospitalizations and referrals for clotting and bleeding disorders. Some say they don’t want to risk vaccine side effects to avoid a disease with a 99% survival rate for those not in high risk categories, and for which we now have safe alternative treatments.

Some said the vaccines are “leaky” and that the majority of COVID patients they’re seeing are vaccinated. They don’t believe the vaccines are working and think they’re fueling the creation of new variants. One said this vaccine technology has never been deployed successfully and there’s no data on the longterm effects. They say the vaccines are still undergoing their first year of study, and their safety and effectiveness aren’t yet proven. They’re in touch with other health care workers and say they aren’t seeing the “surges” that the public is being told are happening. Some health care workers say they already have natural immunity from COVID exposure.

And finally, as the aforementioned registered nurse put it, “This is America! I have every right to make an educated decision regarding my health care. No matter what you are told, what I do has no direct effect on you.”

There’s more at the link for subscribers, but that’s the reasoning, from the mouths of health care workers. Please note that I’m vaccinated myself, and I’m not endorsing their views. You can disagree with them, say their concerns are unfounded or overblown, or argue that the risks of the disease outweigh those of the vaccines. But please stop saying that everyone who resists vaccine mandates is ignorant of science and medicine, because this shows that a lot of highly-trained health care professionals obviously beg to differ.

Mike Huckabee

Reading Mollie Hemingway’s new book RIGGED, about the 2020 election and the factors that tweaked the outcome, one might start to wonder what the Hillary/DNC attorney and activist Marc Elias is doing these days –- besides dodging subpoenas, of course. But if a process server from the special counsel’s office is having difficulty finding him, I know where he is, and his army of attorneys.

They’re in Virginia, for the razor-close gubernatorial race! The Elias Law Group, the new firm he started to elect “progressive” Democrats after leaving Perkins Coie, filed suit on Friday on behalf of the state Democrat Party against the U.S. Postal Service, citing delays in processing and delivering election-related materials. Over the pasts few months, the Virginia General Assembly has also repealed voter ID, allowed 45 days of “no-excuse” absentee voting, and set up automatic voter registration as part of getting a driver’s license.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/oct/25/virginia-democrats-file-lawsuit-against-us-postal-/

The election will be over in a week –- not necessarily the counting, though. An Emerson College poll taken a few days ago shows candidates Terry McAuliffe, the Democrat and huge Clinton crony, and Glenn Youngkin, the Republican and businessman, tied at 48 percent among very likely voters. (Accuracy plus-or-minus 3.2 percent.)

Youngkin held a big rally in Suffolk on Monday evening that was attended by Republicans, independents and even apparently some Democrats who, according to FOX NEWS’ Sara Carter, are "here as a referendum of what they say is a dangerous leftist agenda that is not only growing here in Virginia, but across America.”

McAuliffe let a little too much of that agenda slip recently when he said parents shouldn’t be telling teachers what they should teach their kids. Oops. He could still win, though, even now; the clueless Democrat faithful do support their jackasses.

But the election is seen by many conservatives as the start of a “red wave” of parents fighting for kids, a national referendum on Critical Race Theory, the teaching of which has, sadly, put Loudoun and Fairfax Counties on the map in recent weeks. One dad interviewed by Carter on the HANNITY TV show said, “It’s everywhere right now. But Virginia is somewhere where we can do something about it, right now. People are charged up; all eyes are on us...We don’t want it in Suffolk, we don’t want it in Virginia, nobody else wants it in the rest of the country. We want our country back, our state, and our city.”

Carter heard one refrain over and over: We want the government out of our kids’ education! We want to be in charge. We don’t want to be called “domestic terrorists.” We’re tired of mandates. Let us talk to our school boards. We want a voice!

Former President Obama is campaigning with McAuliffe, and he might be making it worse for the candidate. He brought up that old saw, voter suppression, saying Republicans are trying to keep some people from having their voices heard. The only ones whose voices we don’t want heard are the fraudsters. We conservatives are tired of having our own voices silenced.

And who else would be on the podium with McAuliffe but Stacey Abrams, who never conceded her failed run for governor of Georgia and still maintains that voter suppression kept her from winning that race. As if voter ID and signature verification kept anyone from voting who wanted to. It’s fraud that suppresses the vote of honest people, and that’s the message that needs to be communicated far and wide.

When McAuliffe brought Abrams to the stage, he said, “She would be the governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election. That’s what happened to Stacey Abrams. They took the votes away.”

Which brings us back to Marc Elias and the discussion of just whose votes get taken away. The great Margot Cleveland has a new piece in THE FEDERALIST in which she accuses Democrats in Virginia of “working to make elections sloppy again” as we go into 2022.

In this election that’s essentially neck-and-neck, Cleveland says “the more important trend for Americans to consider...lies not in the tight election, nor even in the party affiliation of the eventual victor, but on efforts by local election officials to violate state law to profit their preferred candidate.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/25/how-virginia-democrats-are-working-to-make-elections-sloppy-again/

There’s a lawsuit in Fairfax County right now, filed by a REAL voter integrity group called the Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP) against the country registrar and three members of the local elections board, over allowing unauthenticated mail-in ballots in violation of state law. A provision is supposed to be in place requiring the last four digits of a voter’s Social Security number, but apparently it’s not being followed.

According to the state constitution, officials aren’t supposed to just suspend a law they don’t like. The Anti-Suspension Clause provides that “all power of suspending laws, or the execution of laws, by any authority, without consent of the representatives of the people, is injurious to their rights, and ought not be exercised.” If the state legislature requires the last four digits of one’s Social Security number to verify a ballot, then so be it.

As of October 14, this suspension of law had affected at least 339 ballots, according to the filing. Now, 339 ballots might not sound like a lot, but when you’ve got two candidates in a dead heat, it can mean everything. And unauthenticated mail-in ballots should not be deciding this or any other race.

The VIPP has already prevailed in one similar lawsuit, stopping the Virginia State Board of Elections from counting ballots that arrived without a legible postmark as many as three days after the polls closed on Election Day. But even though they won, Cleveland says, the fact that they have to file suits like this at all tells us something very important:

DEMOCRATS ARE WILLING TO BREAK THE LAW TO WIN.

Virginia, she says, is a perfect case study. But I would add that in 2020, Maricopa County was another one, as we saw how Elias and his vast army of lawyers, marching into Arizona in a way that would make Kim Jong-Un swell with pride, got rules changed to make it easier to cheat. No matter what lip service they give to election integrity, counting “every vote,” stopping voter suppression and protecting “our democracy,” they could not actually care less about any of that, as long as they win. Their actions tell it: They’d suppress your vote in a heartbeat if it meant more leftists in office. The top Democrat attorneys like Marc Elias are showing them how it’s done.

In the movie THE RIGHT STUFF, as the U.S. is competing with Russia to be first in space, our lead scientist (who is German) quips, “Our Germans are better than their Germans.” We have to think similarly in fighting the left. Our lawyers have to be better than their lawyers.

Mike Huckabee

I’m confused. I need someone from the Democratic Party to explain to me whether questioning the results of an election is treasonous or heroic. Because they can’t seem to make up their minds.

We’ve all heard the caterwauling over anyone who even wants to take a look at the ballots from 2020. They’re crazy conspiracy theorists peddling a “Big Lie!” There’s no such thing as election fraud! Questioning election results is an assault on democracy and an attempt to overthrow the government by insurrection!

Yet in just the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen Hillary Clinton claim that Stacey Abrams really won the 2018 Governor’s race in Georgia (spoiler alert: she did not.) Hillary, of course, also declared Trump an illegitimate President, and was so convinced that Russia helped him steal the 2016 election that her campaign spent a lot of money manufacturing fake evidence to prove it. Seen any Democrats denouncing Hillary for her multiple endorsements of insurrection? Or calling out Abrams for assaulting Democracy? Far from it: she’s considered a big star in leftist circles.

Meanwhile, in Virginia, Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe campaigned with Abrams and repeated her “Big Lie” that she “would be the Governor of Georgia today had the governor of Georgia not disenfranchised 1.4 million Georgia voters before the election…They took the votes away.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ari-j-kaufman/2021/10/24/mcauliffe-abrams-peddle-conspiracies-to-virginians-at-rally-n1526589

This is horse apples. The voter rolls were purged of inactive voters, but all anyone had to do was show up at the polls and produce an ID and they could get a ballot. Abrams lost by about 55,000 votes. Even the liberal Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigated and found "no evidence…of systematic malfeasance – or of enough tainted votes to force a runoff election."

Listen to enough of this highly selective outrage and it becomes clear that to Democrats, “democracy” means “We win,” and questioning the honesty of an election is “insurrection” only if it’s an election Democrats won. It reminds me of Mel Brooks’ definitions of tragedy and comedy: “’Tragedy’ is if I get a paper cut on my finger. ‘Comedy’ is if you fall into a manhole and die.”

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

We don’t elect kings to lead us. We are not a monarchy, and in fact we are not a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic. A true democracy is rule by simple majority and every one votes on every issue. A Constitutional Republic is where we democratically elect representatives who serve on our behalf to make laws that are in line with our framing document, the Constitution. Each citizen has one vote and each individual is considered equal to every other citizen. We are considered individuals with personal liberty and personal responsibility. But our form of government has been under attack by those who want to replace it with an entirely different kind of government. A Marxist, socialist government would trade our being individuals to our being a part of a collective in which the government is to be served by its people rather than its people being served by the government. Instead of us having equal opportunity that is up to us to create prosperity, a Marxist approach diminishes the individual in deference to the state. We only matter as we bring value to the government. If we actually keep moving in that direction, it will be the end of our storied nation that empowered people from all nations, languages, religions, and economic circumstances to live freely and self-determine our future. Those who have worked hard and prospered will be penalized by the state and will have their property and their wealth confiscated. It will be redistributed to those who chose not to work, learn a valuable trade, get an education, or act as responsible stewards of their resources. And when you unfairly tear down the top and artificially raise up the bottom, the result is across the board mediocrity. It’s the equivalent of A students having points shaved off their grades and given to F students so that everyone in the class gets a C, whether one studied hard or partied hard. The incentive to work hard is destroyed, and the motivation to rise up and do better is marginalized. At that point, we become like so many nations before us who tried socialism only to see it destroy an economy, jobs, the value of capital, and creativity. Even art and architecture become bland and lifeless. Surely Americans don’t want that and will rise up against it! When I hear the left tell us that we have 10 years before climate change will turn us into greasy spots on the pavement, I want to scream to forget about climate change—we won’t last 10 years under socialism with inflationary high prices, empty shelves, lack of labor, and meaningless elections, and the only people left with a high standard of living will be those in the ruling class of government. Look around—we are rapidly becoming that. And the tone-deaf princes of power running our government have the audacity to insult us by saying that the problems of high prices for gas and groceries are only problems of the high class. It seems that the academics and people in the high perches of politics and power think you struggling to heat your home, fuel your car, put food on your table or clothes on your kids’ backs are nothing but symbols of wealth. Just when you think politicians can’t get dumber, one of them says “Hold my beer, and watch this!”

You may think you don’t want to be involved in politics, but friend, you ARE involved. You can sit back and let it happen or you stand up and take the power away from the people who hate America, but not caring really is no longer an option. If you like the direction our country is going, you don’t have to do anything but nothing. But some of us won’t give up on America without a fight. And I hope you are one of us!

Mike Huckabee

A new Fox News poll finds an overwhelming percentage of Americans are worried about the economy, and the negative ratings for President Biden’s handling of it are rising even among Democrats (an 11% drop in approval in just one month.) Almost nine in 10 voters are worried about inflation, and a staggering 84% say rising gas prices are a problem for their families.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/voter-worry-inflation-biden-economy-ratings

And no wonder: as of today, the average cost of a gallon of regular gas according to Triple A is just under $3.38. In California, land of liberal “governance,” it’s $4.53. And in the remote small town of Gorda, California, a gallon of regular unleaded is $7.59 and premium is nearly $8.50.

https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-america-gas-skyrockets-7-59-per-gallon-us-town/

If you’re hoping for relief soon, dream on. The Biden Administration has backtracked and decided not to challenge a court ruling blocking the Willow Project, an oil and gas drilling project in Alaska that would have generated 100,000 barrels of oil a day and created 2,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent jobs and which had already passed an extensive review for environmental impact.

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/10/21/gas-hits-unbelievable-high-while-biden-shuts-down-more-american-oil-options-n460634

President Biden admitted that gas prices are up and said they likely won’t go down until 2022. I’d say 2024 is more like it, when we can get a President back into office who hasn’t declared war on our domestic fossil fuel industry that was thriving as recently as last year.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/biden-predicts-gas-prices-wont-go-down-until-2022

Just as a reminder of how your vote has consequences: In February of 2020, when Trump was still in office, one of my writers snapped a photo of the sign at his local gas station in suburban Dallas as he filled up his tank. A gallon of regular was $1.89.

And Biden told you he wasn’t going to tax the poor and middle class!

Mike Huckabee

Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland was grilled by the House Judiciary Committee. Here’s a pretty dispassionate recounting of who said what.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/merrick-garland-house-judiciary-committee-hearing-doj-testimony

And here are a few more conservative-oriented assessments:

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2021/10/22/garland-fails-to-explain-why-leftists-get-away-with-attacking-federal-buildings-n2597836

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2021/10/22/garland-gets-grilled-on-the-hill-n1525951

https://redstate.com/mike_miller/2021/10/21/garland-once-again-proves-he-is-the-sleaziest-of-the-sleazy-on-team-biden-n460540

The major points we learned from this are that Garland denies ever referring to angry parents at school board meetings as “domestic terrorists” (to be a stickler for accuracy, that’s just how someone else described it, based on the way he proposes treating them.) He claimed only to have learned from the media about that letter from the National School Board Association that was the alleged catalyst for him calling for federal action against parents.

If so, then he’s not very well-connected at the White House, since they apparently knew about it before it was even sent.

https://freebeacon.com/campus/white-house-knew-about-letter-that-compared-parents-to-domestic-terrorists/

I noticed something interesting about the questions: Republicans focused on current issues and things Garland might do in the future, like the school board memo and parental rights, Garland’s potential conflict of interest with his son-in-law making millions selling Critical Race Theory materials to schools (he insists there is no conflict of interest, so that’s that), and whether there will be an investigation of Hunter Biden’s art sales.

Democrats’ questions were mostly attempts to keep past issues on life support, like whether Trump will be indicted for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels (Google it.) One actually complained that the DOJ was going too easy on Trump supporters arrested back on January 6th. You know, those people who were held for months, some in solitary, or under abusive conditions such as delayed medical care, before they were even charged. If that’s “going easy,” what do you call letting people go free after they loot cities, attack police and try to burn down a federal courthouse with people inside it?

And if the January 6th arrestees are ever charged with anything, what will it be? One thing we learned yesterday is that it probably won’t be “insurrection.”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/10/21/merrick-garland-debunks-democrat-insurrection-claims-about-capitol-riot-n1525820

Mike Huckabee

Thursday, President Biden took questions in a CNN “townhall.”

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10118843/Biden-says-cops-emergency-responders-fired-not-getting-vaccine.html

I use the quotation marks because CNN always seems to find a “town” that’s at least 90% Democrats. In this case, of the 12 people allowed to ask questions, only two were Republicans, and the first one didn’t get to speak until 20 minutes before it ended. Even one of the questioners identified as an “Independent” attacked Republicans and “rogue moderates” and asked why Biden didn’t just force through the Democrat agenda. Sounds like that person is an “Independent” like “Democratic socialists” are “Democrats.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-biden-town-hall

The biggest news points to come out of the evening were:

* Biden admitted he didn’t have the votes to pass his $3.5 trillion spending bill if it retained his hike in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.

* He said he was considering doing away with the Senate filibuster to pass the Democrats “voting rights” (i.e., “legalize vote fraud”) bill, but not for all bills, because that would lose him three votes for his $3.5 trillion spending bill. (Note: I don’t think “doing away with the filibuster” works that way. You’d think that someone who spent 370 years in the Senate would know that.)

* He said he was considering sending in the National Guard to ease the supply chain crisis. I guess that’s easier than reversing the liberal policies that are causing it, like the AB-5 law in California that banned independent contractor truckers. A national version of that is in his $3.5 trillion bill, if you want to know how serious he really is about fixing the supply chain crisis.

By the way, over 100 House Republicans signed a letter explaining why Biden’s $3.5 trillion porkulus bill would be a death blow to the supply chain.

https://www.westernjournal.com/100-gop-reps-bidens-3-5-trillion-bill-death-blow-americas-supply-chain/

* He said the US would defend Taiwan if China attacked it. China seemed really intimidated by that threat.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-taiwan-china-defend

And why should they be, since they now seem to be outstripping us in military weapons development?

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10116479/China-tested-SECOND-hypersonic-orbital-nuke.html

* And the quote that made the biggest news: Biden doubled down on threatening police officers and other emergency workers and first responders, saying that if they refuse to comply with his COVID vaccine mandate, they should stay home or be fired (the fact that this received “thunderous applause” from the audience should tell you the kind of audiences CNN assembles for these dog-and-pony shows.) He then ridiculed the very idea of Americans having the freedom of autonomy over their own bodies, mocking them by saying, “I have the freedom to kill you with my COVID. Come on.” (Still unanswered: the question of how unvaccinated people endanger vaccinated people if the vaccines work.) This also overlooks the fact that many of those people worked through the pandemic at great personal risk, and were likely already exposed to and recovered from COVID so they have natural immunity.

I have a feeling that Biden dismissing cops and first responders and mocking freedom will be a recurring theme in many 2022 campaign ads.

I couldn’t help wondering what people might be thinking who actually voted for Biden because he was sold to them as a moderate centrist who would return compromise and respect for other people’s views to the White House. Also, he hailed first responders as the heroes of the pandemic, vowed not to impose a government vaccine mandate, and even expressed reluctance himself to take any vaccine that was rushed to market under Donald Trump. Now, those first responder bums' lives can just be ruined if they’re skeptical of vaccines he sowed distrust in, and they resist the mandate he promised never to impose.

I’m leaving out the biggest news of the night: he got through it without dissolving into gibberish or wandering off stage. But it might have been better if he’d done either one of those things rather than say what he did about first responders. He might want to consider that if he plans to brutally enforce a vaccine mandate, it might be good not to alienate the police. The Democrats have done enough of that already by defunding police departments and legalizing crime.

For more on that, check out this story about how an iconic Target store is the latest to close in San Francisco because the same people come back every day and rob them blind, and the liberal leaders who refuse to make them pay any consequences for theft are denying that’s the real reason. This account comes directly from some fed-up cops speaking anonymously, so you can imagine how much loyalty they still have to liberal Democrats.

https://californiaglobe.com/local/san-francisco/exclusive-iconic-target-store-in-mission-district-to-close-amid-a-shoplifting-tidal-wave/

Prof. Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit has a good op-ed on police pushback against vaccine mandates, and how forcing officers to quit will result in them becoming private security so the wealthy will be safe while poor and minority neighborhoods will suffer (thanks again, Democrats!) One silver lining: the Democrats seem to want to impose a police state, but that’s going to be hard if the police are so furious they’d rather quit than obey Democrat policies.

Finally, it wasn’t as if the Biden Townhall didn’t have a healthy scoop of false claims and incoherence, which Nick Arama at Redstate.com chronicled:

https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2021/10/21/bid

Mike Huckabee

The good news is that Congressional Democrats have caved before the tsunami of outrage over their plans to have the IRS track every financial transaction or bank balance over $600 and have raised the limit to $10,000. The bad news is that they’re still trying to have the IRS track every transaction or bank balance over $10,000.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/10/20/democrats-now-say-they-will-only-snoop-on-bank-transactions-over-10000-n1525471

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said, “Today’s new proposal reflects the Administration’s strong belief that we should zero in on those at the top of the income scale who don’t pay the taxes they owe, while protecting American workers by setting the bank account threshold at $10,000 and providing an exemption for wage earners like teachers and firefighters.”

Republicans pointed out that this would still intrude on the privacy of every small business owner and many individuals who might have balances or transactions over $10,000, for everything from depositing daily restaurant earnings to saving for a car to making a down payment on a house.

We’ve heard this “It'll only trap rich crooks” claim before, when law enforcement was given civil asset forfeiture powers. It wasn’t long before they were happily abusing that power to seize cash, houses and other assets from innocent Americans who were lucky if they could ever get their rightful property back. Here are just 10 particularly egregious examples out of many:

https://listverse.com/2015/06/29/10-egregious-abuses-of-civil-asset-forfeiture/

Do you really think that if the IRS gets this snooping power, that agency or the politicians overseeing it won’t abuse it?

Besides, if the real target is very rich tax evaders, why is the threshold set at $10,000? People in that tax bracket spend that much on a watch or a designer gown to wear to a gala with AOC. Would they really risk audits and jail time over what they would consider sofa cushion change? $10,000 may sound like big bucks to you, but it’s nothing to the people the Democrats claim are the target. Setting it that low means you are the target.

Mike Huckabee

I know that most Americans don’t care to read about the problems of nations on the other side of the world. But I urge you to read this story from the Epoch Times about the ongoing genocide of Christians in Nigeria (70,000 so far) at the hands of Muslim extremists.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/epoch-times-journalists-praised-for-coverage-of-nigerias-genocide_4051465.html

It’s shocking that so many American media outlets trumpet their belief that “black lives matter,” yet give no coverage to the genocide of black Christians in Nigeria. But Lara Logan of Fox Nation has produced a documentary on it called “21st Century Terrorism Revealed.”

One thing it reveals is that if you think, “It’s a terrible tragedy, but it has nothing to do with us,” you couldn’t be more wrong. Bad American policy under Obama had a direct impact on causing this genocide. Obama and John Kerry worked to undermine the Christian President of Nigeria because he passed a ban on gay marriage, and helped elect a Muslim President who’s turning a blind eye to the slaughter of Christians – and who also kept the ban on gay marriage.

Nor is the danger likely to stay isolated to Nigeria. As Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom told the Epoch Times, this is “not simply a human rights and humanitarian crisis of genocidal proportions, it is also an American security concern. Today, Mahanga is a terrorist base camp; tomorrow, half of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous and economically prosperous country, could be one. The U.S. government must recognize the gains being made by Islamist extremists in this region under the approving eye of its President - an apologist President who continues to generously aid their efforts. Nigeria is rapidly becoming a global catastrophe.”

It may be too much to hope that the same President who just handed over Afghanistan to the Taliban and left our people behind will do anything about saving Christians in Nigeria or preventing that nation from becoming a new haven for global terrorism. But if enough Americans learn what’s going on and how it could come back to bite us, maybe our next President will.

Mike Huckabee

Here’s something the White House was so eager for you to see, they released it with great media fanfare on...late Friday afternoon.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Climate-Finance-Report.pdf

Ah, we’re just having a little fun with sarcasm. As everyone who’s not an idiot knows, late in the day on Friday is when the government dumps documents it hopes will receive minimal media attention and stay under the radar. This time, it darned near worked, too; we’d like to thank Glenn Beck for calling attention to this report, dated October 14: A ROADMAP TO BUILD A CLIMATE-RESILIENT ECONOMY --- U.S. Climate-Related Financial Risk, Executive Order #14030.

Never mind all the climate-related predictions that have not come to pass. This report assumes the absolute worst, blaming climate change for all extreme weather such as wildfires and hurricanes, in a way that allows it to say that one out of every three Americans has been affected by the “climate crisis.” Our ability to deal with the financial fallout from this “climate crisis” is lacking, the report warns: “In short, the current suite of data, tools, disclosures and mitigation strategies fail to help investors, policymakers and the public understand and make decisions grounded in the economic realities of the climate crisis.” So, hooray, the government is here to fix that. This is our lucky day.

Biden’s Executive Order #14030, signed May 20, 2021, calls for the federal government to lead financial institutions by example by “appropriately prioritizing Federal investments.” And it’s far- reaching; “This report lays out a roadmap for measuring, disclosing, managing, and mitigating climate-related financial risk across the economy, including to the Federal Government, while also catalyzing public and private investment to seize the opportunity of a net-zero, clean energy future.”

This will require radical change and control---I mean nurturing guidance, but without this, we would really miss out. As the report says, “By sustaining the status quo, we not only face the mounting repercussions of climate change, but also...of missing out on on an historic chance for job creation, shared prosperity, and a more resilient future. THE UNITED STATES MUST INTEGRATE CLIMATE RISKS THROUGHOUT ALL RELEVANT ASPECTS OF THE ECONOMY AND FINANCIAL SYSTEM. [Emphasis mine.] And, in doing so, it must meet the moral and economic imperative to rectify decades of disproportionate environmental damage imposed on historically disadvantaged neighborhoods.”

This “broader economic strategy...leverages the full talent and creativity of all Americans by elevating equity [NOTE: “equity” means an engineered equality of outcome; see Critical Theory] as a top priority in all decision-making, and restores the United States’ relationship with key allies internationally, finding common ground to meet the global goals of the Paris Accord.”

Recall that newly-inaugurated President Biden rejoined the Paris Accord his first day in office. It’s described in this government press release at the time as “an unprecedented framework for global action.” And that’s exactly what it is.

https://www.state.gov/the-united-states-officially-rejoins-the-paris-agreement/

Criticism of this new "roadmap" is bound to be interpreted as “climate skepticism,” which is now verboten on YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. So, wasn’t that timed well?

Glenn Beck warned in March that this was coming, as banks were starting to implement “environmental, social and governance (ESG) scores” on their own. These were an outgrowth of the Paris Accords –- which Trump had wisely pulled out of before Biden brought us back in –- and simultaneous meetings of the world’s largest financial institutions. The World Bank and the U.N. brought together 230 banks and insurance companies to outline what became known as “The United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI),” which drafts a methodology for, as Beck put it, “to bend the private sector to the will of the government by using banks as a pressure or a choke point.” We went hunting and found their “Principles of Responsible Banking.”

https://www.unepfi.org/banking/bankingprinciples/

Consistent with these, Article 2.1(c) of the Paris Accords states: “This Agreement...aims to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change, in the context of sustainable development AND EFFORTS TO ERADICATE POVERTY [emphasis mine], including by making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse emissions and climate-resilient development.”

This is the way government gets to follow all the money---I mean, “finance flows.” (I would add that this is very much in the spirit of the recent call for U.S. banks to report every transaction over $600.) It might also determine whether a bank will loan money to you and what you have to do in order to get it. This is, well, serfdom.

The one thing that was lacking till now was full U.S. government support, which is what the "roadmap" released on Friday apparently gave. It essentially means that financial incentives will be used to make the public conform to whatever the government deems of value in controlling and dealing with climate change. They argue that this will make us more competitive with nations such as China –- which makes no sense, as China won’t be bound by any of this. (And why should they, when they already HAVE total government control?)

The "roadmap" mentions French legislation called “France’s Energy Transition Law” that uses the principle of “comply or explain.” In France, every bank and every company needs to provide a full accounting to the government “disclosing all of their ESG measures.” Beck cites the most recent report from Coca-Cola in Europe that runs to 98 pages of “explanation” to justify their license to do business. But you don’t have to read 98 pages; note the two paragraphs titled “Global Relevance” on the PRI (Principles of Responsible Investment) website at the link and see that “comply or explain” is indeed a real thing.

https://www.unpri.org/climate-change/french-energy-transition-law-global-investor-briefing-on-article-173/295.article

The White House is directing Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to begin a similar initiative under the Financial Stability Oversight Council, using the justification that climate change is a national security threat. Knowing Janet Yellen, we’re sure she can’t wait to implement this.

We haven’t read the entire report yet, only the introductory parts, but according to Beck it will require Americans’ compliance in order to, say, continue having insurance or maintain a savings account. It does this under the auspices of protecting Americans’ savings and pensions.

Obviously, all businesses having contracts with the federal government will be particularly vulnerable to this control.

They're even “addressing climate risk in the VA lending programs.” That’s the amazing thing about “climate risk” –- it affects everything! VA lending is mentioned in the glowing press briefing from Friday, at the link.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/10/15/fact-sheet-biden-administration-roadmap-to-build-an-economy-resilient-to-climate-change-impacts/

Essentially, the government is using the perceived "climate crisis" as a pretext to run everything, to take control of what was left of the free market and everything we do or own. It’s not a crazy conspiracy theory –- it’s there in the report, and we really don’t even have to read between the lines very much to see how this works. By bringing the report out very quietly late on a Friday, they obviously were trying to keep any discussion of it as low-key as possible. Let’s see what we can do to foil that plan.

https://www.theblaze.com/shows/the-glenn-beck-program/glenn-beck-did-you-hear-biden-s-great-reset-warning-shot-to-banks

Mike Huckabee

Mike Huckabee

More video from the January 6th Capitol protest has been released, and as with the first video that the government tried to suppress, it doesn’t exactly support the claim that this was a violent insurrection. The new video appears to show someone opening a door, people walking inside, and police standing aside and letting them come in. If they were “forcing their way in,” they don’t appear to be aware of it.

https://redstate.com/bonchie/2021/10/18/new-january-6th-surveillance-footage-further-calls-into-question-the-entire-january-6th-narrative-n458811

If the House Democrats are having trouble finding actual footage of violent rioters attacking police, I know where they can get some. Unfortunately, it wasn’t taken in the Capitol on January 6th.

In a related story, former President Trump is suing the Congressional committee “investigating” the January 6th Capitol riot to block them from obtaining White House records that he says are protected by executive privilege.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/rick-moran/2021/10/19/trump-sues-january-6-committee-to-block-release-of-records-related-to-capitol-riot-n1524990

The Democrats claim that those records might prove that Trump was talking to aids about planning a violent insurrection, which is ridiculous on the face of it. It’s more likely just a fishing expedition to try to find anything to accuse Trump of. Trump asked Biden to respect his executive privilege and refuse to comply, but of course, Biden said no because “TRUUUUUUMP!!!!”

This led some legal scholars to warn the Biden White House that they’re making a serious mistake. There isn’t likely to be anything in those records that will show Trump plotting an insurrection, but the fact that Biden failed to stand up for executive privilege could set a precedent that makes it harder to assert for future Presidents, as well as for himself if Republicans win Congress in 2022 and start launching investigations into the Biden White House.

But then, planning ahead and thinking about longterm consequences aren’t proving to be this Administration’s strong suits.

Mike Huckabee

Democrats keep pointing to polls showing that a majority of Americans support their $3.5 trillion spending orgy bill. But the same polls show that most Americans don’t actually know what’s in it. We’ve tried to correct that here by pointing to several stories that detail some of the horrors within, like this:

https://banks.house.gov/uploadedfiles/final_reconciliation_.pdf

But today, let’s take a look at two very specific things that would directly affect most of you if that monstrosity passes. For instance, it would greatly expand the size, powers and reach of the IRS. Democrats claim that’s just to make the rich and corporations pay their “fair share,” so why does it allow them to snoop into every bank account with at least $600 in it?

And here’s something they haven’t told you: The IRS is most likely to audit people who have income that isn’t reported or that doesn’t match what’s in their bank accounts. The people that most closely describes are the working poor, such as handymen, bartenders and wait staff. According to journalist Saager Enjeti of the “Breaking Points” podcast, under this bill, the IRS would be THREE TIMES more likely to audit someone making less than $25,000 than someone in the top 1% of earners.

https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-irs-plan-working-class-americans-3-times-likely-audited-rich-elites/

As the linked article points out, it’s not just the threat of audits that should worry you but also the intrusive nature of IRS snooping, allowing the government to see every purchase and donation, and potentially use that information to try to categorize and intimidate you into behaving the way they want you to (Think that’s hyperbole? Do you not want to get vaccinated? How’s that working out?)

Also hidden in the dense verbiage of that giant bill are various measures to vastly enrich and empower the labor unions that make up one of the Democrats’ biggest support groups. This is inspired by California’s disastrous AB-5 law that just about killed the gig/freelance/contract worker economy.

That doesn’t just harm people who prefer working freelance, from Uber drivers to people who work at home via the Internet. Derek Hunter at Townhall.com has a column about how tragically unqualified Pete Buttigieg is to be Transportation Secretary, and at one of the few times that job is vital, during the supply chain crisis.

https://townhall.com/columnists/derekhunter/2021/10/19/secretary-mayor-pete-is-a-disaster-n2597631

In it, he makes the point that Biden’s order to unload cargo 24/7 at the L.A. port is pointless because there aren’t enough truckers to take it anywhere, because AB-5 outlawed independent contractors, which were most of the state’s truckers.

https://www.westernjournal.com/dumb-idea-trucking-industry-reportedly-no-confidence-bidens-plan-solve-shipping-crisis/

In short, one of the big reasons why we’re facing potential empty store shelves is the idiotic leftwing law passed by California that the Democrats want to take nationwide via their $3.5 trillion socialist utopia wish list bill.

Will “free government-paid day care” really seem all that attractive when you don’t need day care anymore because your job was eliminated?

Mike Huckabee

One of the most depressing aspects of modern politics is the way that people see the death of a fellow human being not as a time to set politics aside and show respect but as an opportunity to score cheap political points. This ranges from the sewer scum level of Twitter trolls gleefully celebrating a political opponents’ death to sanctimonious attempts to utilize the deceased as a weapon to attack others.

There’s been a lot of the latter around the death of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Probably the slimiest, not surprisingly, came from CNN’s Chris Cilizza, who used Powell’s death to smear the entire Republican Party. He wrote an article called “The Colin Powell Republican No Longer Exists.” But if the point is that Powell was a moderate who rejected “extremism,” then I could just as easily write an article called “The Colin Powell Democrat No Longer Exists.”

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnn-chris-cillizza-colin-powell-death-lecture-republicans

Powell obviously had his personal reasons for starting to vote for Democrats (which he did with Obama, long before Trump entered politics.) I can disagree with that decision without attacking him or millions of others, but that’s beyond some people.

Naturally, there was also sniping back and forth over the big topic of the day, since Powell was fully vaccinated but it was initially reported that he’d died of complications from COVID-19. Everyone was trying to score points over that, pro- or anti-vaccination. In fact, his vaccination status was irrelevant. Powell was 84 and suffered from several conditions that make people more vulnerable to COVID even if they are vaccinated, including a form of blood cancer called multiple myeloma. A study found that 55% of sufferers fail to fully respond to vaccination because of their limited ability to produce antibodies.

There are many tributes to Gen. Powell online and there are many criticisms. You don’t need me to point them out to you. But I will link to this column by Kurt Schichter, who is also a military veteran. While not a Powell fan, he recognizes his accomplishments, balances his praise and criticism, and does a good job of explaining why Powell might have moved from Republican to Democrat, and why it had to do with his own personal viewpoint and larger changes in government and the culture rather than tens of millions of Republicans being horrible people.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/10/19/colin-powell-and-the-crisis-of-the-boomer-elite-n2597632

UPDATE:

I’m disappointed that former President Trump used the occasion of General Powell’s death to air grievances he had with General Powell. There are times, when it’s best not to say anything than to say something that is harsh, especially when the target of the comments is deceased. Even if you’re a former President.

Mike Huckabee

It may seem like an impossible dream, but AOC has a challenger in New York’s 14th House District who might actually have a chance to boot the media’s favorite socialist fashionista out of Congress.

https://www.westernjournal.com/person-win-aoc-just-entered-race-left-panic/

Like AOC, this person is Hispanic and even a former bartender – but that’s where the similarities end. Desi Cuellar’s parents fled Cuba to escape the socialism that AOC is so enamored with. He knows what it’s like to be poor, work hard and even be homeless, but he refuses to blame America for his early struggles or play victim. He even joined the National Guard because, he says, he “wanted to do more for my country.”

Cuellar said, “I am proof that opportunity exists for anyone in this country, that America is worth fighting for, that our values and our constitutional rights set us apart from the rest of the world. But my opponent AOC is doing everything she can to undo what countless Americans have died to preserve.”

He says, “As a New Yorker, I’m sick and tired of seeing AOC use our city as a launching pad for her socialist agenda.” He’s made a hard-hitting ad that can be seen at the link above. I wish him all the luck in the world.

It might seem like an insurmountable task, since AOC got 71% of the vote in 2020. But note that the 14th District has a population of nearly 700,000, and AOC’s total vote was less than 153,000. There are a lot of people there who didn’t bother to vote. Let’s hope Cuellar can inspire them to go to the polls and remind them that they elect someone to Congress to represent their beliefs and interests, not those of Bernie Sanders, Karl Marx or Fidel Castro.