Mike Huckabee Aims for the Gutter

Former Arkansas governor draws flack for an immigrant-scapegoating tweet.

John Taggart/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

What, exactly, is wrong with Mike Huckabee? That’s what a lot of observers are asking after the former Arkansas governor and Christian minister tweeted out a photo this morning of what appears to be a group of Latino gang members, and joked that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—one of the Republican Party’s favorite Democratic bogeywomen—had just introduced her campaign committee to take back the House.

There are two glaring problems here: First, the tweet is racist in its implications. Second, amid an ongoing border crisis in which President Donald Trump has made deeply dehumanizing statements about desperate asylum seekers—going so far as comparing them to insects—Huckabee’s tweet falls into a Republican pattern of low-brow scapegoating.

Trump and his minions regularly conflate Latino criminals and gang members—MS-13 in particular—with the vast majority of people who enter the country from down south, legally and illegally. In reality, these are overwhelmingly law-abiding people who come to work, and often to escape horribly violent conditions back home. And the data shows that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than Americans who are born here.

The Twitter response to Huckabee was swift.

https://twitter.com/AdamSerwer/status/1010507244163813376

Just yesterday, in the midst of outcry about Trump’s family separation policy, the president held a press event at the White House with so-called angel families, people who had a relative killed by an undocumented immigrant.

Without a doubt, those families deserve sympathy. But the event’s timing, intended to deflect from the pain the administration is inflicting on other, often severely traumatized parents and children at the border, makes it a most callous political move.

Later this morning, after touting his upcoming appearance on the “Huckabee Show,” Trump took his own jab at Pelosi.

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate