Townhall Review | Commentaries

Inflation is destabilizing the world, especially with huge spikes in energy prices. These spikes make it difficult for our NATO allies to hold their nerve against an aggressive Russia because they depend on Russian energy. 

High energy prices prop up Russian power. Oil was over 100 dollars a barrel in the lead-up to the last Russian foreign adventure known as the Crimean crisis. Now oil is high again, Putin feels he can afford to be reckless. 

When oil prices are low, the bear sleeps. Every time we debase the dollar —which remains the world’s reserve currency—we get inflation. And: Every time we choke off energy production, we feed the Russian bear. 

If you stabilize the dollar, you don’t just fix U.S. inflation, you help fix global inflation. If you stop throttling U.S. energy production, you weaken tyrants. 

Decline isn’t fate. It’s a choice. 

It’s time to make better choices. 

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The Supreme Court has just agreed to hear a pair of cases challenging race-based affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. It could signal the death knell for the legal regime establishing “diversity” as the rationale for considering skin color in college admissions.

This sort of thinking has fueled the identity politics—on race and sex and sexual identity—that dominate today’s college campuses.

Ironically, it hasn’t produced what matters most for any university: Diversity of thought.

Any admissions system should strive to ensure equal opportunity. Those surmounting extraordinary challenges should be rewarded. But it’s wrong and racist to assume that race equates with disadvantage. The child of a poverty-stricken white meth addict from Appalachia is hardly more privileged than, say, Barack Obama’s daughters.

Chief Justice Roberts has written, “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”  Now we’ll see if he meant it, and if the other justices agree.

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Recently, the New York Times somewhat right-of-center columnist David Brookes wrote an important column about how America is “coming apart at the seams” and he shares some compelling data. Our driving rates have fallen in the past two years, but traffic fatalities have risen significantly. We’re becoming more reckless. Abuse towards workers in retail, healthcare and the airline industry has also spiked. Addiction and overdose rates have spiked as well. Social cohesion is being strained to what we pray is not the breaking point. 
 
Brookes admits: He can’t explain why this is happening, but I think he's asking the wrong question. Conservatism, grounded in Christianity, knows that we don't have to explain why societies disintegrate; we have to explain why they ever held together in the first place. Human nature is deeply flawed. The war of all against all is our natural state. Western civilization, especially American civilization is a miraculous but fragile exception to that human history. 
 
Our only real hope is to recapture that worldview—and repair the seams.

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This is Carol Platt Liebau for Townhall.com.

The Department of Justice says it’s very worried about domestic terrorism. So worried, in fact, that it just created a whole new unit focused on finding and prosecuting domestic terrorists.

You should be worried, too. Not because there’s any reason to believe there’s a big boom in actual domestic terrorism. But because it looks like the DOJ is playing some very ugly politics.

Last week, we learned that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona solicited a letter from the National School Boards Association. It compared parents to—you guessed it!—domestic terrorists. These were the parents who had shown up to complain about Covid measures and critical race theories beloved by the Biden administration.

It paints a disturbing picture of an administration determined to use high office to paint—and worse, prosecute—their political opponents as domestic terrorists. It’s abusive, it’s un-American, and it must be stopped.

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This is Jerry Bowyer for Townhall.com.

We recently received the inflation numbers for December. And I’m sure most of you are feeling it: We are at 7 percent year-to-year inflation—the highest annual rate in 40 years. It may well be the most important fact in the U.S. economy right now. 2021 gave you inflation.

This was not only predictable; it was also avoidable.

When money supply grows at vastly higher rates than money demand, inflation results. If the Fed keeps adding trillions to the monetary base at the same time that the regulators suppress commerce, that amounts to more money, chasing fewer goods, an inflationary double-whammy.

Is anyone helped by this?

Yes, the ruling class in politics and finance who get the new money first, get to spend it before the resulting inflation.

It’s time to put the blame where it belongs: a binge-spending government and a central bank in the role of enabler.

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There are few freedoms more precious to the family of a critically ill person than the right to try a potentially lifesaving medical protocol. Sadly, that right is being denied to Daniel Pisano, now on a ventilator at the Mayo Clinic, with less than a 5  percent chance of survival.

With little left to lose, the Pisano family has asked that Daniel be treated with a Covid plan recommended by the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance. That plan involves using Ivermectin. But the Mayo Clinic has refused, stating that the Critical Care Alliance’s Covid plan is at odds with its own  Covid protocols. The courts have sided with Mayo Clinic. 

This is madness. 

Multiple peer-reviewed studies have demonstrated Ivermectin’s efficacy in treating COVID. But the larger point is this: How dare Mayo clinic and the courts deny a patient’s own family any voice in the treatment of their loved one?

This is un-American medical authoritarianism, and it is shameful.

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Last week, the Supreme Court of the United States—in a 6-3 decision—blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate. 

I need note briefly: As president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, we entered into a lawsuit against the Biden administration over this vaccine mandate precisely because it was outside constitutional bounds—it would violate religious conscience while effectively turning a theological seminary into an extension of the regulatory state. That is not only unconstitutional, it’s unacceptable. 

The most important reason the court’s majority gave in blocking this regulation was the fact that there was no clear congressional authorization whatsoever for OSHA to do any such thing.

After all: If OSHA can promulgate this rule and make it stick, what could it not do? 

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Will the 2022 midterms see a “red wave” that will drive Democrats from control of Congress? A new Gallup analysis of party identification shows Americans have already begun voting – with their feet, evidenced most immediately in their party affiliation. In a single year, party affiliation shifted 14 points in the gap from a nine-year Democratic high to a 27-year record for Republican advantage.

This confirms that Joe Biden’s confidence-crisis cascade has seriously damaged Democrats’ claims to be a responsible governing party. The hard-Left turn by Biden and Democrats have pushed voters into the GOP’s camp. They have virtually ignored inflation, the supply chain crisis, and pandemic mitigation to pursue their hobby-horse radical agendas.

Republicans should carefully watch this trend, too. This shift took place almost entirely in the middle—as voters got disillusioned by Biden’s promises to govern from the center. Voters want to support a responsible governing party, not give free rein to ideological extremes.

Misunderstanding this would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in November and 2024.

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Perhaps we should not have expected much better from the president who once told an audience of black voters that Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.” Joe Biden’s track record for demagoguery and dishonesty goes back decades, but the absolutist smears in his speech in Georgia last week were astonishing—even for Biden.

The president ran as a uniter and a centrist. His speech, almost a year to the day since his inauguration, cast opponents of his bills as traitors on par with Jefferson Davis.

 This sort of demagoguery is clearly based on desperation. The most recent Quinnipiac poll puts Biden’s job approval at 33 percent. His radical agenda has flopped. The pandemic and massive inflation are hammering American households. Voters ask themselves not if they’re better off than a year ago, but whether they’re more worse off than at any time over the last 40 years.

 Biden’s only remaining move is to attack his opponents as domestic enemies. That only demonstrates his political and moral collapse.

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As Glenn Youngkin assumes office, Virginians weary of Ralph Northam are united in hoping their new governor holds fast when it comes to the issue that clinched his victory.

That’s education. Youngkin’s opponent, Terry McAuliffe, said parents shouldn’t be telling schools what they should teach. In light of the pernicious doctrines being spread under the rubric of critical race theory, that was a serious mistake. Governor Youngkin must stand by his promise to ban CRT from the classroom on “Day one.”

But there’s another issue motivating the suburban parents who provided Youngkin’s crucial margin: how Northam handled education during the pandemic. Virginia’s school districts were some of the last to reopen classrooms full-time.   

Glenn Youngkin has a great opportunity. Under his leadership, Republicans can win the loyalty and gratitude of parents of all races and income levels. They simply have to keep the schools open, and ensure children are educated, rather than indoctrinated.

We’re rooting for him.

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