Nikki Haley Stresses Responsibility in Call to Moms for Freedom Summit – News Block

PHILADELPHIA—Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, a Republican presidential candidate, blasted Republicans and Democrats alike Friday when she called for a new style of leadership in a speech to Moms for Freedom’s Joy Warriors National Summit here.

Haley began by telling the parental rights group her life story, how her parents had immigrated from India, and how her mother encouraged her by saying, “Your job is not to show (other children) how you are different; your job is to show them how you are alike.”

“It’s amazing how our country could use my mother’s advice right now,” said Haley, also a former governor of South Carolina.

After being elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives with a degree in accounting, she said, she focused on the cronyism she found there. At the time, lawmakers voted on legislation and other measures by “voice vote,” which means little accountability to voters for the decisions of representatives in office.

“If you didn’t know how your House representative voted 97% of the time, and you didn’t know how your senator voted 99% of the time, how did you know who to vote for when you went to the polls?” Haley asked.

When she introduced a bill that would require a written record of how state representatives voted, Haley recalled, she was stripped of all committee assignments.

In response, Haley said, she ran for governor and won. She recounted trumping bad leadership in both parties by focusing on sound economic policy that comes from “an accountant, not a lawyer.”

Haley described her service as US ambassador to the United Nations and praised then-President Donald Trump’s decisions to strengthen sanctions against North Korea and move the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

As president, Haley said, she would be the solution to the problems she described.

NAEP test scores and other education statistics show that the United States was failing in its public education system long before the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

Haley criticized both Republicans and Democrats for government spending that has skyrocketed the national debt, particularly the lack of accountability in COVID-19 “relief” packages.

The former governor criticized the push by Democrats to ban voter ID requirements as racially demeaning and patronizing.

“They keep saying that minorities ‘can’t,’ and I want to tell them, ‘Yes, we can, we always have.’ All minorities want is freedom, freedom to do and be whatever we want to be.”

The crowd cheered as Haley trashed the Biden administration’s immigration policy and described the horrors at the US southern border, where she said she traveled more than 400 miles of violence, trash and disaster.

“Lots of clothes, lots of shoes,” she recalled, “rape areas that women and girls have to walk through to survive.”

Haley blamed much of the current fentanyl trafficking across the southern border on China, which “knows exactly what it’s doing.”

In foreign policy, Haley criticized nations that receive annual US foreign aid while voting against the US at the United Nations. As she listed nation after nation for which the US is losing funding, the crowd grew expectant.

Voices from all over the audience began to murmur “Ukraine.”

After listing Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Zimbabwe, Belarus and Cuba, Haley reached a crescendo, asking the crowd, “And the one that turns my stomach?”

The attendees said “Ukraine” in unison, but Haley did not say “Ukraine.” She named China.

Haley previously defended America’s extensive financial support for Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine war as preventing “another world war.”

After what appeared to be a confused applause from the crowd, Haley regained her momentum. She ended by praising Moms for Liberty for standing its ground against left-wing organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center that has labeled parental rights activists “anti-government extremists.”

Haley ended by proclaiming that if concerned parents are the standard of what the US government calls domestic terrorists, “then that makes me a freedom mom, too.”

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