Pray For Longtime Friend And Mercer Reader James Huggins

Please pray for my longtime reader and dear friend James Huggins. A member of my American family, really.

James was diagnosed yesterday with COVID-19, among other serious ailments that come with age.

As with so many seniors, COVID was likely contracted in a nursing facility.

I love James and I am moved to tears—humbled—that he urged his kids to contact me as soon as he was hospitalized, so as to keep me in the loop. We are usually in regular contact on Facebook, which he joined at my urging. We had messaged about a month or two ago, and I had been worrying about James since he fell silent.

Over the years, my column has proven a good litmus test for drawing quality people to me. And James was one of the first to hound me mercilessly on WND.COM, in the early 2000s, for what he believed was my misguided anti-war stance. (Archive here.)

But so bright and free a man is James (“I’m cleaning my guns on the kitchen table,” he would email), that he quickly came to the philosophy of freedom, which precluded much of the Republican Party’s politics, and certainly Bush’s war.

After we had had one of our arguments about Bush’s war, James once wrote, at WND, that he’d rather go up against Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guards than confront Mercer. So enamored was I of the man’s good-natured, Southern flare—idiom and humor—that I urged James to contribute to BAB.

James soon became a regular and valued contributor to my Barely A Blog. Regrettably, BAB’s thriving Comments section was closed, at the urging of one Christy Kiltz, an arrogant web-developer to avoid. (This Oregonian, and the coven of tantrum-prone witches that huddled at her office, generally got irate when their client dared to politely reject their ugly designs and rotten, shrill advice. Apparently, a client’s role is to comply with the girl gurus. (Kiltz, moreover, has the audacity to call herself a guru of coding, when she could not even convert a PHP archive to WordPress for me. A real guru did it in a matter of  days.) Sadly, however, Kiltz was successful in intimidating me into closing “Comments.” (“Spam,” you know.) At the behest of this unpleasant and errant brander and developer, I lost the readers that frequented the site daily. With my blog closed to Comments, I also lost valued, daily contact with James Huggins.

Here are some of his BAB blog posts:

“Letter of the Week: In Defense of Coulter”

“In Defense Of David Koresh.” [Well, of course.]

This bright, funny and fabulous granddad deserves—and must have—many good years ahead. Join me in praying he gets them.