A police raid of a small Kansas newspaper should have all Americans outraged, if only President Joe Biden's Justice Department did not already lower the bar on Americans' acceptance of abuse of power, former Arkansas GOP Gov. Mike Huckabee said on Newsmax.
"It's pretty simple: Once you have the Justice Department of the federal level trampling all over people's civil rights, it starts trickling down and these police agencies think that they're all capable of just trampling every amendment in the Bill of Rights," Huckabee told Wednesday's "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE."
"This is not what this country is about," Huckabee added. "We have fundamental rights of privacy. We have rights that have to be protected and preserved. We have due process. We have presumption of innocence until proven guilty.
"But we're not seeing a lot of that right now, given the way the Justice Department has been treating Donald Trump and anyone who supports him."
A small central Kansas police department is facing criticism for raiding a local newspaper's office and the home of its owner and publisher, seizing computers and cellphones, and allegedly stressing his 98-year-old mother enough to cause her weekend death.
Host Carl Higbie railed on the violations of the Constitution and Huckabee agreed.
"I'm so glad to see how outraged you are, Carl, because every American ought to be. And you're dead on when you say the reason this ought to upset every American," Huckabee said. "This isn't just about a newspaper in Kansas. It's about your front door. It's about your home.
"It's about your personal rights, having the police just show up on your doorstep and say, I want your computer or want your cellphone; I want all your files, and I'm going to scare the daylights out of everybody in your house; and if your mother dies well, too bad."
"This is all about intimidating citizens," Huckabee continued. "That's what they've been doing to Donald Trump. It's what they're trying to do to people across the country who have a conservative point of view."
Americans need to wake up and get educated on the constitutional rights with which we are endowed, Huckabee concluded.
"We have a lot of people in this country that never passed ninth grade civics," he said. "It's a real shame, and they have no idea what their basic fundamental rights are. They don't understand the First Amendment, and they sure as heck don't understand the Fourth and the Fifth or the 14th.
"And it's kind of a shame that when these kids grow up, and they have not a clue about the country they live in. They couldn't name five senators or three House members.
"They're not even sure of World War II really happened. Well, when you have that kind of civic ignorance, you have people that say, Oh, yeah, come on in and look around and snoop and take a look and see what you find. And if you find something you don't like, well, take me to jail over it."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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