The Greatest Gift

Blessings on you and your family from all the Huckabee team! Welcome to the 49 people who have joined us since yesterday If you are reading this but haven’t subscribed, join the 336,000+ smart, conservative subscribers:

Today’s newsletter is below. Feel free to forward it to friends, family and co-workers.

Sincerely,

Mike Huckabee

P.S. The Morning Edition is a reader-supported publication. It delivers Monday-Saturday.

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Daily Bible Verse

Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.

Luke 6:38

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BLACK FRIDAY

Happy Black Friday, America! Although thanks to the Internet and now month-long “pre-Black Friday” sales, Black Friday is no longer stirring as much controversy as it did when it first started bleeding into Thursday night and pulling people away from their family Thanksgivings. Black Friday has expanded so much that most of the best deals were sold out by last Tuesday. But don’t worry, we still have Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday to come (Small Business Saturday is especially important to support this year, with so many small businesses still reeling from the aftereffects of the disasters that struck American: Helene, Milton, Biden and Harris.) And after all that, the Christmas shopping season officially begins!

This year, the supply chain shortages have eased and the inflation rate is down from its recent peaks, but the results of three years of high inflation have many Americans suffering from a money shortage. So if you want your money to do double-duty by buying great gifts the recipients will love while also supporting the writers, artists and comedians who dare to buck the entertainment industry’s liberal cancel culture, may I suggest that you give books, DVDs and music from the artists, writers and comedians who dare to come on my TBN show? If you go to http://www.huckabee.tv, you’ll find my previous shows and be reminded of these great guests who deserve your financial support and don’t use your money to try to destroy your rights. You help them out, the folks on your gift list get great entertainment, and angry Hollywood socialists don’t get your money. Everyone wins!

Of course, I hope you’ll also consider supporting all of us who work so hard year ‘round to bring you the “Huckabee” TV show, newsletter and website.

To get you started, here’s a link to the “Huckabee” TV show merchandise store (all items made in the USA) that helps support the great programming on TBN:

https://shop.huckabee.tv/

Here’s a link to my books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Mike-Huckabee/e/B001ILIF1G

You’ll even find my books specifically about Christmas: “A Simple Christmas” and the children’s book, “Can’t Wait for Christmas.”

You also can’t go wrong with the great book by my daughter, the best Governor in America, that reminds you of what the first Trump Presidential term was really like, not the false cartoon created by the leftist media:

https://www.amazon.com/Speaking-Myself-Faith-Freedom-Inside/dp/1250271339

For lovers of classic jazz/Great American Songbook music, I highly recommend all the award-winning CDs and best-of vinyl LP by “Huckabee” writer and retro jazz singer Laura Ainsworth. Her late dad played with Tommy Dorsey, Ray McKinley, Tex Beneke, Freddy Martin and other great big band leaders, and backed artists like Tony Bennett and Ella Fitzgerald, so she actually grew up with this music and has it in her DNA.

You can find links to buy all of Laura’s terrific music, including her latest CD of requested standards, “You Asked For It,” that’s been racking up awards and nominations (most recently for Female Vocalist of the Year at David L. Cook’s Artists Music Guild Heritage Awards) and to follow her on Facebook, X and Instagram, at her website: http://www.lauraainsworth.com.

As you well know, Laura is also a terrific writer. She co-wrote a book with her friend, US Navy veteran and singer/songwriter Bill Sanner, about his time on a Navy submarine in the 1970s. It’s a great book for all military families, but especially Navy and Submarine Corps vets:

https://www.amazon.com/Sub-Par-Adventures-Snakebite-Stonefinger/dp/1517655420

Finally, if you enjoy the weird news segment “In Case You Missed It” on my TBN show, you’ll love “Nine Hallmarks of Highly Incompetent Losers,” the book Laura and my other writer, her husband Pat Reeder, wrote when they had their own daily radio comedy service. It’s a hilarious “reverse self-help book” that illustrates common sense advice about what NOT to do with hundreds of hilarious but true news stories. (I wrote the foreword!)

https://www.amazon.com/Nine-Hallmarks-Highly-Incompetent-Losers/dp/0615939678/

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The Greatest Gift

I’m sure you’re all still enjoying that warm drowsiness from all the food, and I don’t want to spoil that by writing about politics. That can wait. Instead, I’d like to talk about something that doesn't change with the passing headlines. It's the greatest gift that a parent can give to a child: the gift of character. As parents are discovering to their shock how thoroughly leftists have infiltrated schools and are attempting to warp their children’s minds, morals and characters, many parents have suddenly realized just how important it is to take a stand to protect their children from pernicious influences. And no, that doesn't make you a domestic terrorist.

Where does character come from? It’s rooted in parents teaching their kids integrity and respect for others. And it may not be politically correct to say so, but kids need to be disciplined according to traditional, agreed-upon standards.

With Black Friday being diluted by month-long sales and Internet shopping, we’re thankfully seeing fewer stories about people so crazed to get at bargains that they commit violence against each other. A worker was actually trampled to death once at a New York Walmart. The crowd even trampled other workers who were trying to help him; and when told the store was being closed because of the death, they shouted curses and just kept shopping. But these atrocious incidents still happen. In crime-ridden blue cities with “progressive” DA’s, the violent mob “shopping” sprees happen every day, and they don’t even bother to pay.

If you could turn back the clock a decade or two, I'll bet you would find most of those shoppers and shoplifters as kids, running wild, bullying other kids, sassing their elders...in other words, having no rules, no boundaries and being taught no consideration for others. If you'd said anything to their parents then, they might've replied, "We don't want to stifle their creativity." Or “How dare you criticize my perfect child?!” Or "We don't want to impose our standards on our kids. Let them figure out for themselves what feels right to them."

There are thousands of strips of asphalt in every city. Imagine what would happen if every airline pilot figured out for himself which strip of asphalt “feels right” to land on.

Instead of admitting that their kids’ behavior was objectively wrong, those parents might've tried to rationalize it as simply being “free-spirited” or maybe needing a Ritalin prescription. Or most likely, they would've cursed and punched you for daring to question their parenting.

Children may act as if they resent discipline, but they not only need it, most secretly crave it. They need parents to instill the Golden Rule and to teach them that there are certain lines we all must stay within, or else society falls apart. That’s a lesson we’re seeing with frightening clarity recently, with the rise of radical groups who think that laws don’t apply to them and that the degree of “passion” they feel somehow gives them the right to destroy artworks, burn buildings, loot businesses, and attack, bully and intimidate others into silence. They want countless boundaries and restrictions that apply to other people, but none for themselves. Whatever feels right to them, they just do, even violence and vandalism. I think the election showed us how many people are fed up with indulging that. They didn’t feel in the mood to validate another “brat.”

We live in a time when mass media and social media cause shifts in standards for language or behavior to spread almost instantly. Both living and historic figures are condemned for not measuring up to some PC rule that didn’t even exist yesterday (are you old enough to remember ‘way back when it wasn’t considered hateful, bigoted, intolerant transphobia to object to a man walking into the girls’ school locker room with his pants off when your 15-year-old daughter was in there?)

Just days before Thanksgiving 2021, a statue of Thomas Jefferson that had been in the New York City Council Chamber since 1915 was removed because Jefferson no longer measured up to the high standards of such giants of public service as Bill DeBlasio and the NYC Council (personally, I suspect that the statue of Jefferson requested its own removal from that skunks’ den.)

We should stop constantly judging the past by ever-shifting standards of the moment. As British author L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” The only fair way to judge anyone, past or present, is by the immovable moral standards that are not subject to the whims of changing fads and opinions. To do that, children have to be taught such standards. Standards such as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Take responsibility for your own actions. Try to keep your head even when everyone around you is losing theirs. These are things that were true centuries ago, they’re true today, and they’ll be true centuries from now.

I once had the importance of such solid guideposts brought to my attention in a way I will never forget. In 1997, Arkansas was struck by a devastating tornado. As Governor, I was visiting one of the worst-hit towns when State Rep. Martha Shoffner said she had to show me something. She took me to a courthouse whose roof was completely gone. Inside was a museum in which everything had been blown away or destroyed…except for one thing. Still hanging on the wall was my official Governor's photo. It hadn’t broken or fallen off. It wasn't even askew. I took it as a sobering reminder that no matter what disaster might befall our state, it was the Governor’s responsibility to remain steady as a rock and see everyone through.

The thought occurred to me then that we can't keep storms out of our kids' lives, and we can't teach them to hide from storms. We also can’t let them go on believing that if they scream loudly enough, the storms will give in and go away (sorry, President Biden, but humans can’t control the weather.) All we can do is give them a strong enough foundation so that when life’s storms inevitably come, they'll be prepared to ride them out with a level head and a steady hand.

Here’s wishing you a courteous Black Friday and a safe and happy Thanksgiving weekend!

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