Ron DeSantis steps aside MIKE HUCKABEE JAN 22

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Today, if you have a moment, leave me a comment about something you read. Comments help me fine tune what I am writing, and they show that we have an active community of readers. The Morning Edition is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Upgrade to paid Sincerely, Mike Huckabee P.S. The Morning Edition delivers Monday-Saturday. Daily Bible Verse “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are becoming new.” 2 Corinthians 5:17 Ron DeSantis steps aside As I said last week in my monologue on my TBN show, the importance of the Iowa Caucuses isn’t so much that they pick the winner of the primaries but that they narrow the field by telling us who is definitely not going to be the winner. This year, Chris Christie dropped out before the first vote was taken, and Asa Hutchinson quit the day after. And on Sunday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, once considered the top challenger to Trump, decided to pack it in after coming in a distant second to Trump in Iowa. With very little campaign structure in New Hampshire, and South Carolina being Nikki Haley’s home state, there wasn’t much chance of him regaining momentum anytime soon. https://www.westernjournal.com/watch-fl-gov-ron-desantis-drops-republican-primary-backs-trump/ I know from experience that it’s a very hard decision to make, and I congratulate him for putting the good of the party and the nation first. Besides, it’s hardly the end for him (a new poll shows he’s already the leading GOP candidate for 2028.) DeSantis made an excellent speech in which he endorsed Trump, saying, “It’s clear to me that a majority of Republican primary voters want to give Donald Trump another chance. They watched his presidency get stymied by relentless resistance, and they see Democrats using lawfare to this day to attack him.” Trump once again showed his ability for turning on a dime and putting hostilities aside the second a battle is over. He announced that he was “very honored to have his endorsement” and said it’s “time for unity,” and that he has officially retired the derogatory nickname “Ron DeSanctimonious” (admittedly, not one of his better efforts), and “he will return to being known as GOVERNOR RON DESANTIS.” https://www.westernjournal.com/mending-fences-trump-says-honored-desantis-endorsement-wants-work-together/ DeSantis said, “I signed a pledge to support the Republican nominee, and I will honor that pledge. He has my endorsement because we can’t go back to the old Republican guard of yesteryear, a repackage formed of warmed-over corporatism that Nikki Haley represents. The days of putting Americans last, of kowtowing to large corporations, of caving to woke ideology are over.” He added that while he has his differences with Trump, he “is superior to the current incumbent, Joe Biden. That is clear.” Unfortunately, some of DeSantis’ supporters didn’t take the news well or listen to his reasons for endorsing Trump. They’re having tantrums and refusing to vote for Trump (warning: lots of F-bombs and other offensive language at this link, much of it, ironically, because they think Trump doesn’t express himself with enough class.) https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2024/01/21/desantis-influencers-melt-down-were-not-uniting-behind-trump/ They may say they’ll sit the election out or write in a candidate, but here is a cold, hard fact of political life: Presidential elections, like gender, are binary whether you like it or not. If you don’t vote for Trump, then it’s the equivalent of adding one more vote to the Biden column, to continue four more years of open borders, rampant crime, drugs pouring into the US, surveillance and jailing of political opponents and their supporters, runaway spending and inflation, high interest rates and growing threats all around the world. If you’d take all that to avoid mean tweets, then you need to get your head examined. Maybe some of these people have fallen for the relentless negative media campaign against Trump that started the minute he announced his candidacy in 2016. Or maybe they actually are listening to the outrageous lies from Biden and his minions about Trump being a “dictator” and a threat to democracy who will weaponize the government against his political opponents (frankly, if I wanted more of that, I’d vote for Biden.) We all lived through the first Trump term, and until COVID was unleashed, it was a time of peace, prosperity, low inflation, relatively secure borders, reduced government regulation and expanded protections of Constitutional rights. If you believe the opposite now, then you are either really susceptible to gaslighting or you just fell off the turnip truck. As for the hysterical claims that Trump will be another Hitler: He was already President once, and he never invaded Poland or mistreated his Jewish grandchildren (wish I could say the same about how Biden treats all his grandchildren.) Besides, the Democrats have been falsely comparing their Republican opponents to Nazis ever since Harry Truman did it to Thomas Dewey. If DeSantis had been the candidate, you can bet they would have done it to him, too. They were already working on it before his campaign faltered. I urge all Republicans to put aside their personal differences and resentments, not merely for party unity but for the good of the United States of America, and vote for whoever you have to in order to deny the Democrats four more years of swinging a wrecking ball at the foundations of America. One more term of the current misleadership, especially if Democrats take back Congress and can stack the Supreme Court, loosen election laws, and eliminate the Senate filibuster and the Electoral College, and this nation will no longer exist. I will not be frightened or intimidated by offensive, cynical, phony-baloney comparisons of Trump or any other Republican to Hitler. Even the real Hitler never managed to orchestrate a successful invasion of the US homeland like Biden has. Related Reading: Both Kurt Schichter at Townhall.com and Bonchie at Redstate.com were DeSantis supporters, but they’re not going to commit political and national suicide just because their candidate didn’t win. Here are their commentaries, and to quote Schlichter: “Get over it.” https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2024/01/22/time-for-us-desantis-supporters-to-rally-around-donald-trump-n2633961 https://redstate.com/bonchie/2024/01/22/the-desantis-post-mortem-youve-been-waiting-for-n2169046 Good news How about some good news from the world of politics that has nothing to do with politics? Congratulations to Sen. Tim Scott, who announced that he popped the question to his girlfriend Mindy Noce on the beach in Kiawah Island, South Carolina, and she said, "Yes." https://redstate.com/smoosieq/2024/01/22/she-said-yes-sen-tim-scott-announces-his-engagement-after-south-carolina-beach-proposal-n2169044 Ominous During a live broadcast from the Arizona border to mark the third anniversary of Joe Biden’s Inauguration (and coincidentally, three years of open borders that are, like, totally the fault of Republicans somehow), a reporter asked an illegal border crosser where he was from. The man ominously replied: “If you are smart enough, you would know who I am. But you are really not smart enough to know who I am. But soon you’re gonna know who I am.” https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/01/21/defiant-migrant-with-middle-east-accent-soon-youre-gonna-know-who-i-am-you-will-see-1429674/ Some online commenters said he seemed to have a Middle Eastern accent, but someone seen with him claimed he was from Morocco. Wherever he was from, the Libs of TikTok X account called the exchange “terrifying.” It’s a chilling reminder that an open border can let in anyone with any intentions, and there are millions more who’ve entered the US since Biden’s Inauguration Day. Memo to World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab: If you don’t like me referring to you and your coterie of wealthy, would-be dictators as “third rate Bond villains,” maybe don’t give interviews in which you talk about Artificial Intelligence replacing elections because the computers can predict who the winners would be. He said, "Afterwards you can say 'why do we need elections?' because we know what the result will be." Yes, I think we do. We also all know what the result would be if we let these people have the power over our lives that they’re obviously lusting after. https://www.theblaze.com/news/schwab-elections-wef-predictive-ai?tpcc=email Among other disturbing things he said was this: "We need new concepts to define what humanity is and what the purpose of our lives is." Actually, we need to return to an old concept for that job: the Bible. Which also predicted better than AI could the rise of the WEF when it warned us in Matthew 7:15, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves.” Extremely Related: The Federalist reports that a survey by the Committee to Unleash Prosperity found that nearly 60% of America’s “elites” believe there is too much individual freedom, while nearly 60% of registered voters think there’s too much top-down control limiting freedom. https://thefederalist.com/2024/01/19/survey-two-thirds-of-elites-say-theres-too-much-freedom-in-america/ The survey defined “elites” as the 1% who have post-graduate degrees, make $150,000+ annually and live in a zip code with over 10,000 people per square mile. They also looked at a subset of that group that attended Ivy League or other elite universities. We’ll call them the “elitest.” Large majorities of the elite (the “John Kerry demographic”) believe in draconian restrictions on other people to control the Earth’s climate. More than two-thirds of the elites and 90% of the elitest favor rationing energy and food (but not their own, I assume.) Majorities of the elites and larger majorities of the elitest also favor banning gas-powered cars, gas stoves, non-essential air travel, SUVs and private air conditioning. Two-thirds of elites think teachers and educationists “should decide what children are taught rather than letting parents decide.” Sixty percent have a favorable opinion of lawyers, lobbyists, politicians, and journalists; and 70% “trust the government to ‘do the right thing most of the time.’” All of these opinions are in stark contrast to those of the people who would actually be impacted by their freedom-crushing dictates. And naturally, three-quarters of elites are Biden supporters and say they’re better off under Biden, while only 20% of regular Americans say that. Let’s hope and pray that all of them are in for the shock of their lives in the next election. I’m sure they fear they will be, which is why they want to replace elections with AI programmed by them. Our two-tiered “justice” system I’ve told you before how former Trump aide Peter Navarro was arrested by the Biden FBI and hauled out of an airport in shackles while he was on the way to do my show. Here’s the interview he was finally able to give after being released. He was recently found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress (by a DC jury being intimidated by protesters outside, but of course, the judge didn’t care about that) for refusing to comply with subpoenas from Nancy Pelosi’s illegitimately-formed January 6th Kangaroo Kommittee. The judge, jury and prosecutors also didn’t care that he had a legitimate reason to refuse to comply: he cited executive privilege, acting on a press release from Trump reading, “I’m telling Peter Navarro to protect Executive Privilege and not let these unhinged Democrats discredit our great accomplishments.” The Biden DOJ prosecutor claimed that that didn’t constitute evidence because it was "issued well over two months" before the Kommittee subpoenaed him. Pardon my ignorance, but what does that even mean? If Trump had told Navarro to cite executive privilege AFTER he refused to comply with the subpoena, then they might have a point; but wouldn’t it make sense that Trump did it before Navarro was subpoenaed? But because none of these warped political prosecutions make any sense, the prosecutors are asking that this man, who has given so much to America via his public service, be sent to a federal prison for six months for allegedly showing well-deserved contempt to the most contemptible group of vicious partisan hacks I’ve seen in my entire career in politics. And he didn’t really even do that; he had a legitimate legal reason: executive privilege, as cited by his boss, the President. I hope he is able to appeal this and get it thrown out. But in this election year, Republicans should remind voters repeatedly that in the same week that the Democrats argued that this man should be railroaded into federal prison for six months for declining a Congressional subpoena on solid legal grounds, they also argued that Hunter Biden should be let off scot-free and get a do-over for defying a subpoena from a legitimate House Committee that he blatantly insulted during a grandstanding press conference. It's a better illustration of our two-tiered “justice” system than any political cartoonist could dream up. The miracle of Bidenomics Two pictures worth a thousand words, most of them unprintable: As part of a campaign photo-op to promote the miracle of Bidenomics, President Biden appeared at a fast-food restaurant in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he’d previously campaigned in 2020. But critics noticed that the menu behind him revealed that the meal he ordered (a “triple thick” chocolate and vanilla milkshake, bacon cheeseburger and fries) cost $5.99 in 2020 and is now $7.69, a 28% price increase in three years. https://www.westernjournal.com/bidens-fast-food-photo-op-backfires-inconvenient-detail-menu-gets-way/ Bottom line: the only “miracle” is how he managed to live to 81 eating like that. Didn’t see this coming Hold on! So you’re saying that filling Sports Illustrated with leftwing, “woke” political opinions and faulty AI-generated articles, and filling the annual Swimsuit Issue with obesity-positivity and transgender models (one of whom appeared in a Satan-glorifying Grammy production number), was NOT a wise sales strategy? Whoever could’ve predicted that?... https://www.westernjournal.com/sports-illustrated-lays-off-virtually-entire-staff-less-year-going-fully-woke/ The union representing the staffers urged SI’s owners to keep publishing it, saying, “We have fought together as a union to maintain the standard of this storied publication that we love, and to make sure our workers are treated fairly for the value they bring to this company.” I hate to rub salt in the wound, but if they’d brought value to the magazine, wouldn’t people still be buying it? It keeps coming back The indictment of Alec Baldwin over the deadly shooting on the set of the film “Rust” was withdrawn last year, but like his bad Trump impression on "SNL," it just keeps coming back. Baldwin was just indicted again for involuntary manslaughter in the death of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins, after a pistol he was rehearsing with went off with a live round in it. Baldwin claimed he didn’t pull the trigger, but a new analysis found that the gun required two pounds of pressure on the trigger to fire. His attorneys will likely argue that the result is unreliable because the gun had been disassembled by authorities and reassembled before testing. Here’s an article that has a lot more details, including some possible directions that prosecutors might choose to take the case. https://fox8.com/news/national/ap-us-news/ap-grand-jury-indictment-against-alec-baldwin-opens-two-paths-for-prosecutors/ Voters get “red-pilled” as more official narratives crumble The best lead-in for today’s commentary on imploding Big-Brother narratives has got to be Victoria Taft’s column for PJ MEDIA, which asks the question, “When was your red-pill moment?” If you’ve seen THE MATRIX --- and probably even if you haven’t --- you know that being “red-pilled” means having your eyes opened to the reality that everything you’ve been told is a lie. For many, this moment was when you learned that the FBI knew Hunter’s laptop was real in November 2019, when they confiscated it from John Paul Mac Isaac but constructed an elaborate hoax to hide the truth of it from the public, gaslighting them into thinking it was “Russian disinformation.” Some extremely gullible people actually still believe this. We don’t yet know for certain, but this lie might have been the most productive way in which the 2020 election was (yes) rigged. Setting aside for the moment the possibility of hacked voting machines (we’ll get to that), a poll of six swing states by the Media Research Center following the 2020 election showed that 17 percent of Biden voters would have not have voted for him if they’d known about one or more of eight news stories about Joe Biden that the news media had failed to cover properly, including the one about him being involved in business dealings in Ukraine. Of course, the same news media that had failed to cover the real laptop story dismissed the MRC poll as too partisan. Phil Bump at the WASHINGTON POST couldn’t even use the word “censoring” to describe what they’d done with the laptop story; he merely called it “limiting.” As Holt reports, the mainstream media were brought into the intel community’s “pre-bunking” of the story at the Aspen Institute in anticipation of Miranda Devine’s story in the NEW YORK POST. The FBI prepped them to think it was Russian disinformation. The “classic earmarks” letter signed by 51 former U.S. intel officials was another lie. The claim that the laptop was fake was just one of many lies that might have “red-pilled” you. How about the lie that Trump was working on behalf of Vladimir Putin, an allegation California Rep. Adam Schiff said he could back up with hard evidence that he never produced? Or the total nonsense, pushed by Hillary Clinton, that Trump’s campaign was coordinating with Putin through electronic “pings” at Alfa Bank? Or, on another subject, the lies from the CDC, force-fed to you on social media, about the need for “police state”-style COVID lockdowns, masks on 2-year-olds and endless vaccines and boosters to “stop transmission,” and the six-feet-apart social distancing that we later found out was pulled right out of the air? Or that suspicions of a leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were a “conspiracy theory.” Or that Joe Biden had nothing to do with his family’s uncanny ability to vacuum up money. The lies just go on and on. Holt writes that such lies, as they’re gradually exposed, turn “political atheists” into “citizen activists.” They’re sick to death of having their intelligence insulted with the constant deception and want to do something about it. https://pjmedia.com/victoria-taft/2024/01/21/lawmakers-amicus-brief-for-trump-n4925625 On the issue of hack-able voting machines, we’re getting closer to the truth about that, too. Though Jim Hoft has promised an update today, he did offer a preview on Sunday in GATEWAY PUNDIT about what was revealed in a Georgia courtroom Friday. A bit of background: perhaps you recall that J. Alex Halderman, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan, came out with a 96-page report that was unsealed by a federal district court in June of last year, attesting to the “many exploitable vulnerabilities” of the Dominion Voting Systems’ ImageCast X system. As reported by Hoft, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had kept this report from the public for two years. Here’s some background from June 2023 on the efforts that had been made to cover up the Haldeman Report. Hoft had reported in June of the previous year that Obama-appointed Judge Amy Totenberg (sister of far-left NPR correspondent Nina Totenberg) was keeping it under seal. Highly recommended reading... https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/06/explosive-halderman-report-released-georgia-confirms-votes-can/ But back to the present. Prof. Haldeman wrote about his findings in a blog post on Wednesday, saying that his team’s examination of the touchscreen ballot marking devices (BMDs) showed “vulnerabilities in nearly every part of the system.” The BMDs can be even be attacked on a large scale, over a wide area, “without needing physical access to any of them.” Obviously, my team and I are not cybersecurity experts and can make no determination on the hack-ability of electronic voting systems. Certainly, we can’t claim to have proof that the machines were indeed hacked in 2020 --- how could we? --- only allegations by experts that they can be. We’re simply relating to you what these experts have testified. But as of now, this conclusion comes not just from a 2-1/2-year-old report, but from an in-person demonstration in the courtroom on Friday. We’ll be getting more information on this today, but Prof. Haldeman reportedly hacked a voting machine and changed the tabulation --- right in front of Judge Totenberg. And all he used was a pen. The demonstration came as part of a lawsuit brought by the election integrity activists at VoterGA, whose goal is to replace voting machines in Georgia with good, old-fashioned, (relatively) secure paper ballots. https://voterga.org We’ve been promoting old-school, non-electronic voting for a long time, nationwide, and it seems they’re making a very good case for it. And if President Trump wants more evidence in his own cases that he had reason to doubt the outcome of the 2020 election, it looks as though he may have found some. https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/01/breaking-professor-election-expert-j-halderman-hacks-dominion/ Speaking of the cascade of cases being brought against Trump in this election year, REVOLVER NEWS investigative journalist Darren Beattie recently echoed Tucker Carlson in calling attention to one of the biggest players all along in that game: CNN legal analyst (surprise) Norm Eisen. “In every high-profile effort to undermine and, really, overthrow Trump’s presidency and the Trump movement more broadly, this goes back a long way,” he said. Eisen runs CREW, whom you’ll recall brought the lawsuit in Colorado trying to get “insurrectionist” Trump off the GOP primary ballot. CREW was formerly run by anti-Trump activist and Clinton “fixer” David Brock, founder of MEDIA MATTERS. https://crewexposed.com/who-is-crew/whos-who-at-crew/ As Beattie told it, Brock released a memo after Trump’s shattering 2016 win outlining what they’d do to prevent Trump from ever having a win again, at anything. The plan was to hit the ground running to stop him at every turn. CREW was responsible for over 100 legal actions against President Trump and his administration, starting with that ridiculous “Emoluments Clause” litigation, which was drafted before Trump was even sworn into office! https://rumble.com/v43pxlb-darren-beatty-exposes-one-of-the-biggest-players-in-the-lawfare-against-don.html That targeting of Trump is something his attorneys apparently plan to bring up in his Mar-A-Lago “classified documents” trial, scheduled to start in May. Judging from their brief filed last Tuesday, they seem to be gearing up to say that the case was manufactured from the beginning, a “crusade” started by the National Archives, undertaken with the aim of kneecapping Trump ahead of the 2024 election. And, yes, they do raise the possibility of White House involvement, requesting to see communications between Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team and the Biden White House. Details here… https://www.theblaze.com/news/trump-lawyers-hint-at-legal-defense-in-filing-highlighting-bias-white-house-involvement-and-ignored-evidence RELATED READING: Julie Kelly has written a detailed follow-up to Darren Beattie’s report on that strange video of the “discovery” of the DNC pipe bomb on January 6. For when you have time, this is not to be missed. Kelly also links to Dan Bongino’s podcast about it, but of course you Huckabee newsletter subscribers have already seen that. Declassified with Julie Kelly Darren Beattie's Latest on the J6 Pipe Bomber In case you missed this report, I want to share Darren’s latest must-read report on another scandal associated with the still unsolved mystery of the January 6 (or 5th, as the FBI claims) pipe bomber. This very well could be a game changer at a time when the J6 narrative continues to crumble… Read more a day ago · 147 likes · 39 comments · Julie Kelly I Just Wanted to Say Thank you for reading my newsletter. The Morning Edition is a reader-supported publication. © 2024 Gov. Mike Huckabee Blue Diamond Media, P.O. Box 242058, Little Rock, AR 72223 ...