WOODBRIDGE, Virginia — “We are at war” with radical Islamic terrorists, GOP candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee told supporters at a campaign rally, where he also mocked the New York Daily News for criticizing people who pray amid terror.
“The attack that happened in San Bernardino was one more reminder that we are at war,” the former Arkansas governor told supporters in Woodbridge, Va., on Friday morning. “Whether our president wants to acknowledge it or not… we are at war.”
“They don’t want to just take some land…they want to kill us every last one of us,” Huckabee added. For the people who think radical Islamic extremism is contained in the Middle East, he said, “I hate to break it to you, but it’s over here.”
“It’s going to get worse before it gets better unless we take this threat seriously,” he warned. “I’m committed to the notion that America has to take that threat of Islamic jihad so seriously that we see it as a malignant cancer,” adding that cancer must be eradicated. “Take it out do whatever you got to do.”
Huckabee also slammed the New York Daily News for its cover on Thursday mocking people who were praying after the terrorist attack in San Bernardino with text that read, “God Isn’t Fixing This.”
“I know that there are people in our culture that really dismiss it,” Huckabee said of prayer. “There’s an entire front page in the New York Daily News that scoffed and mocked it … I don’t mind saying, politically incorrect as it may be, I ask you to pray for me.”
“While many of us were held in contempt for saying that, you know who was really saying that? The people inside that room that were getting shot at. Many of them were texting their own family saying, ‘Pray for us.’ They understood and it’s a shame that people writing the front page of the Daily News and appearing on so may of the left-wing news shows found that that was silly absurd and mocked it.”
“There’s a scripture that God is not mocked,” Huckabee stated.
“We’re not so mighty and we’re not so smart that we can do without help from God’s wisdom and his courage and his leadership,” he added. “I cannot believe there were people that thought it inappropriate in the aftermath of the San Bernardino shooting to say, ‘Lets pray for those people the victims and their families.’”
Huckabee also took time to sit down and take answers from the crowd and explain why he is pushing his ‘Fair Tax’ plan. “We need to completely gut our current tax system that punishes us for working,” he said, proposing the Fair Tax that would only tax on the sale of items, saying, it is “not a tax on productivity. It would change our entire economy.”
“We’d see about $30-trillion of off shore capital come back,” he added.
Huckabee also addressed illegal immigration, referencing the double fence built near San Diego that helped stop violent crime, emphasizing the need to secure the border. Huckabee also said Fair Tax would take away the economic incentive for illegal immigration because everyone would be taxed at the point of purchase.
Huckabee took one question from a special supporter Ella Murray, an 8-year-old who is running for class president.
Murray, a third-grader from Alexandria, Virginia, came with her father to the event and shared with Breitbart News that Huckabee “told me why he wants to be president.”
“Ella had a question for me, ‘Why are you running?’” Huckabee shared with the audience. “I was able to tell her because I want the America that she grows up in and the America my five grandkids grow up in to be a country where she is free,” safe and able to live the American dream.
Several voters sitting near Murray and her father told Breitbart News they were not yet decided on who they will vote for in the primary, but definitely didn’t want Hillary Clinton to be president. One of the women shared that she provided her signature for Huckabee to be on the Virginia ballot.
“We have to get petitions in Virginia to qualify to be on the ballot,” Huckabee explained to the audience. “It is the single most difficult state in the country to get on the ballot.”
“Each state has its own rules for qualifying for presidential candidate. Some are as easy as just sending in your name,” but others require paying $10 to $25 thousand to get on the ballot.
Virginia requires the candidate to reach 5,000 voter signatures derived from all of Virginia’s congressional districts.
Woodbridge resident Jim Whipple – a Virginia voter – told Breitbart News, “I like his view points and his conservatism and also the principles he’s believing in [and] trying to get back to the grassroots, downsizing government and looking out, really, for the heart and soul of the general population.”
“I hope that he wins,” Whipple added.
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