Last month, Mike Huckabee gave a talk on his new book, “God, Guns, Grits, and Gravy” at the church he attends in Florida, the Destiny Worship Center.

Huckabee spent most of the talk deriding New York, Washington, D.C. and Hollywood as “bubbles” that don’t represent real America, which he said is found in the South and Midwest.

As an example of how New Yorkers are ignorant of true American culture and “think we’re crazy,” Huckabee recounted the tale of how he humiliated a New York media elitist Fox News staffer during a debate about guns by suggesting that a pencil is just as much an assault weapon as an AR-15:

I’ll never forget sitting around with my own staff at Fox News, New Yorkers all, and something came up about guns and they were saying about how ‘nobody should ever own an AR-15, there’s just no reason to own an assault weapon.’ And I said, ‘Every weapon is an assault weapon, a pencil is an assault weapon if you poke it in someone’s eye.’ Then I really shocked them when I said, ‘AR-15s, I got several of them.’ They were scared to death, I thought they were going to dive under the table, I really did, it was like they were, ‘He’s a psychopath.’

Huckabee boasted that he schooled the New Yorkers who worried about the dangers of the weapons: “You’re just looking at it and you think because you saw it on a Rambo movie that it must be more lethal than anything else, and I said that’s nonsense.”