Townhall Review | Commentaries

End-of-year resolutions should be doable. One that must be done is to embrace a national resolve —one crossing from right to left— to focus on the existential challenge to the West that is now out in the open in the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese Communist Party has thrown off the happy talk, suppressed Hong Kong, embraced genocide, threatens Taiwan. It makes no apologies for the virus it unleashed on the world. It’s not on a second Long March. It’s on a forced march towards hegemony.

Dealing with this is possible but it requires rapid and resolute agreement on the threat within the United States and not just among Republicans. Both parties have to agree and if it means rejecting isolationist or defeatist extremes in both parties, so be it. We do not have a lot of time vis a vis the CCP. 2022 has to be a year of recommitment to American national security, a bipartisan recommitment.

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It seems elite media outlets in America have finally recognized the futility of zero-COVID policies in China. Beijing has imposed new regional lockdowns as the Omicron variant threatens to spread rapidly, hoping to save their upcoming Olympics. Both CNBC and CNN remarked on how ineffective such policies have proven in the past.

Perhaps American media should take note. Joe Biden promised to “shut down the virus,” a promise that has led to mandates and measures that are as increasingly authoritarian as they are futile.

Scientists have warned for months that we will not get rid of COVID. Instead, we need to accept its long-term endemic presence and get back to normal life. That means continuing to encourage vaccines, accounting appropriately for natural immunity, ensuring supply of new therapeutics and widespread access to testing—and putting an end to emergency mindsets.

We have the tools necessary to live with endemic COVID.

It is long past time to put aside panic and live with it as a free people.

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Chuck Schumer clearly has not learned any lessons from the collapse of the Build Back Better Bill. With inflation raging and Democrats losing a slew of elections last month, Joe Manchin spent the last several weeks making it clear that he would not support Joe Biden’s vast climate change legislation. As he told one interviewer, rather than negotiate with him, Schumer and the White House only tried badgering him into supporting their radical vision.

After Manchin emphatically declared his opposition to the BBB, Schumer then declared that he’d hold a vote on it anyway when Congress returns after the holidays. Not only that, but Schumer promised votes on Democrats’ bill federalizing elections that failed in May and on eliminating the filibuster, all of which Manchin and other Senate Democrats have opposed. It would be a tour of Schumer’s greatest defeats.

He has set expectations far above what Democrats can deliver and has demonstrated just how radical Biden’s party has become.

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Given the powerful and connected people associated with Jeffrey Epstein, the FBI had to know its conduct of the Epstein case would be under a microscope even before the strange circumstances surrounding his death.

Now in the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, it’s come out that the FBI allowed crucial evidence from Epstein’s safe to go missing after Bureau raided his house.

After they raided his house, FBI agents left CDs found in Epstein’s safe behind, as they lacked the necessary warrants. But strangely, the FBI left no agent behind to guard the evidence. So not surprisingly, when they returned, the evidence was gone. Eventually CDs were brought back—but no one can confirm they were the ones originally found in the safe.

The whole episode reeks to high heaven. Too many Americans already suspect the FBI has simply become personal protection for the powerful. This will only deepen growing suspicions that our once-great Bureau has become rotten with corruption.

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Most of you know about Handel’s Messiah—perhaps the most popular and enduring work of George Frideric Handel. But few remember Charles Jennens—who wrote and conceived of the idea of the oratorio, the “Messiah.” Performances are more rare this year as a result of the pandemic, but the oratorio is still performed thousands of times worldwide at Christmas.

Jennens wrote the libretto—the text—of the “Messiah,” tying together the Bible’s central story: God’s salvation of His people through the work of the Messiah.
He used the very words of the Bible for his text. His purpose was to remind the audience of the truth and power of the story of salvation—and thus his attention on the birth of Christ.

Handel put the words to majestic music in just 21 days.

“For Unto Us a Child is Born.” That is the prophet’s declaration. That is God’s great gift to us at Christmas.

Merry Christmas from the Salem Media Group.

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As 2021 draws to a close, Americans have mixed feelings about everything. 800,000 have died from COVID. Many of us miss a calmer era of politics but also of civilized argument. Still, I believe a majority of us share a common faith or at least the morals of our nation’s Judeo-Christian foundation, but much seems off kilter as yet another COVID wave sweeps before us. 

The best way to keep Christmas and indeed the New Year ahead, though, is by treasuring your faith tradition, holding family as close as possible, laying down causes and caustic comments and reveling in the remarkable joys of being alive at a time of vast productivity and material comfort.

Gratitude for the good rather than anger at the awful is an inclination that can lead to a good start in 2022 and hopefully one that extends into the year ahead. Merry Christmas from all of us at Salem Media Group—and all the best of everything for the year ahead. 

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Around our household various movie versions of Charles Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol” run on a continual loop over the holiday season. 

I have long loved that beautiful story, but as a pro-life Christian, I came to love it even more when I noticed certain details in the story which show Dickens embedded a pro-life message. England—when he was writing—was suffering from a panic over population growth, particularly among the poor. 

The misguided economist Thomas Malthus frightened elites with dire predictions about “the surplus population”— yes, the same phrase Ebenezer Scrooge used when he was asked to give support to the poor. Scrooge lived in fear of human fertility, shunning his nephew Fred because he married. 

But history shows that peak panic about surplus population was the exact time when actual poverty was about to begin its long retreat.

Dickens got it right: God blessed us, every single one of us. 

Merry Christmas.

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It’s been said in Connecticut that Senator Richard Blumenthal would go to the grand opening of a garage door. But even he ought to have some standards.

Recently, Blumenthal spoke at an event celebrating the 102nd anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party USA. What a disgrace.

Imagine the outrage—and rightly so!—if a conservative senator participated in a Nazi party event. Everyone knows Nazism is an ugly, murderous ideology of hatred.

But so is Communism. It, too, is a godless, totalitarian belief system characterized by envy and irrational hatred. In the 20th century alone, it’s claimed 100 million victims across Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia.

Its evil face should be shunned by decent Americans just as the Nazi swastika is.

Senator Blumenthal has now apologized for speaking at the Communist Party event. As well he should. 

Anyone who would mainstream or normalize Communism is despicable.

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Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is an old school Democrat, a tribune of working people, and he knows working people are the first to get burnt by raging fires of inflation. He stood up to progressive bullying throughout 2021 and got both the one-time infrastructure spending through the Congress while blocking an almost unbelievable attempt to transform America into a Western European socialist state in the horribly misnamed Build Back Better bill. It may not be just Manchin who is saving the Democrats from themselves—and all of us for that matter—as well as the filibuster, but he’s the one prickling with arrows loosed from the left.

There have been a few figures in the history of the Senate who have stood up for national goals at crucial moments in the era. Michigan’s Arthur Vandenberg—in the era of FDR—comes to mind. It’s not easy at the time but it stands out in the history of our country.

So: Thank you, Senator Manchin. Hang tough.

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Charles Blow—the very liberal columnist for the New York Times—recently wrote a column entitled, “We’re Edging Closer to Civil War.” On the possibility the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision, he wrote: “In some ways the abortion battle now being waged in the courts is a test case. Can the states make an argument that a civil right can be reversed on the state level? Can they make the case that all that the Constitution does not explicitly spelled out should be reserved for the states?” 

Well, oddly enough, Mr. Blow, the answer is yes and yes—sort of. 

The pro-life argument is not that the right to abortion is a civil right that ought to be put on hold or reversed. The pro-life argument is that abortion was never a right,  rightly understood. The right to abortion is not a civil right at all. It isn’t now. It never was.  The Supreme Court declared it a right in 1973, but the justices knew they were inventing a right that was never imaginable in the United States Constitution.

And yes, Mr. Blow: Powers not delegated by the Constitution to the federal government are “reserved for the States respectively.” 

That, after all, is the 10th Amendment—I’m reading the U.S. Constitution.

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