Townhall Review | Commentaries

For nearly two years, the Covid pandemic has cast a shadow over Americans’ daily lives and activities.

It been a long time for adults. Imagine what it’s like for a child—when even a year is like an eternity.

Most adults are sick of the constraints pandemic life imposes. Many have returned to normal—but refuse to allow children the same courtesy, even though children are by far at lowest risk for being harmed by or transmitting Covid.

Adults across the country are maskless at awards shows, concerts, galas and sporting events. But little children sit masked at school, seven hours a day. Some perch miserably outside in 40 degree weather, six feet apart, just to eat lunch. Others eat inside but must do so on the floor.

It’s insanity. In healthy societies, adults sacrifice for children. We’re forcing children to sacrifice a normal childhood to appease neurotic adults. Get the masks off and get our children back to normal. It’s time.

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One of the ugly little details hidden in the House version of the Build Back Better plan is a scheme to raid the Roth IRAs of wealthy individuals who have accumulated a lot of assets in their accounts.

The basic premise of a Roth is: You pay taxes on the money up front and then you don’t have to pay taxes on it later. Of course, that depends on trusting the government. That trust is about to get strained.

Leaked private IRS information shows that some wealthy individuals—notably tech investor Peter Thiel—have been building large balances in their IRAs.

Mark my words: if the law is changed to allow the government to raid these Roth accounts, they won’t stop there. Once the principle is established that these accounts are subject to after-the-fact government expropriation, the asset grabbers will work their way down the income ladder.

Leave the Roth IRAs alone.

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For half a century, feminists have told women to step forward and claim what’s theirs. Yet now they—and the rest of today’s elites—are suspiciously silent as girls’ athletics are being destroyed.

Take girls’ swimming. Lia Thomas, a swimmer at UPenn, spent three years competing as a man. Now, competing as a woman, Thomas beat rivals by astonishing 14-second and 38-second margins, smashing two U.S. world records in the process.

Simply put: Those born male have physical advantages that help in swimming—greater upper body strength, larger hands and feet, more oxygenated blood, and longer arms and legs than most women. Yet we’re being told to ignore these facts as girls’ hard work, sacrifice, and achievements are systematically erased.

Every human being is beloved by God and carries the full weight of His glory. But it’s wrong to force female athletes to compete with biological males—and then make them stand by, smile, and pretend that’s not what’s happening.

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President Biden and his team like to talk about how popular their agenda is with voters. The White House talks about electric vehicles that only the wealthy can afford. They talk about the progressive social policy agenda that they intend to impose in their Build Back Better program. They talk about an economic recovery that few feel.

Rather than talk, perhaps the White House should start listening. At the moment, American voters are experiencing historic levels of inflation and crime – two topics that Biden either avoids or mischaracterizes, but which impact our lives every day.

ABC’s latest poll shows voters have become fed up. Only 36 percent approve of his approach to crime, a drop of seven points in two months. Even fewer approve of Biden’s handling of inflation – 28 percent, while only 41 percent approve of his economic policies, down ten points since September.

Democrats’ agenda is entirely disconnected from American life. It won’t be long before voters disconnect Democrats from power. 

 

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China has built the largest DNA database in the world—and it’s only growing. This should concern all of us. That’s because China could use this information in the future—perhaps, for example—to build bioweapons targeting specific ethnic groups.
 
Given this background, common sense dictates that Americans shouldn’t be storing their DNA or other personal information with Chinese-linked firms. Quite sensibly, after getting an FBI briefing about the firm’s connections to China, the Los Angeles County Sheriff notified the County that his office wouldn’t work with Fulgent. That’s the genetics firm LA County hired for mandatory covid testing and registration. Fulgent even admits in a public disclaimer it stores information outside the United States, where data privacy protections may not be as secure. I’ll bet. 

What’s alarming is how many others HAVE chosen to work with Fulgent. They include federal agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, and local entities, including the New York public schools. The question is: Why?

 

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I recently attended the annual shareholder meeting of Microsoft where, as an investor, I put a question to the management of the company asking why Microsoft, like so many other companies these days, seems to feel the need to divert attention away from their day job and dabble in divisive political issues.

Turns out that I’m not the only one who shared that concern.

The moderator said many people were asking about that on both sides. This is real progress. It used to be that Christians and conservatives were completely MIA from this new front in the cultural battlefield. We didn’t show up—and thus we lost by forfeit.

But things are changing: Brad Smith—Microsoft’s President—responded by saying business leaders do not need to, “speak out on every issue under the sun” and should stick to issues directly related to business concerns. That’s a step in the right direction, but it’s not enough.

We all need to do more.

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Outgoing New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has just imposed an emergency vaccine mandate on all public and private workplaces in response to the latest COVID variant. Not only is this premature, the motivation looks more like grudge settling than public health.

De Blasio’s edict doesn’t go into effect until December 27, less than a week before he leaves office. Why not immediately? If de Blasio thinks it will stop Omicron’s spread, the time for the mandate is when workplaces are open—not when most offices will close down for holidays anyway.

This smells more like payback than wise public-health policy. The incoming mayor, Eric Adams, criticized de Blasio over his public-sector mandates and lack of coordination with city-employee unions. De Blasio’s order and timing leaves a mess in Adams’ lap without rationally addressing the potential risks of the new COVID variant, which has yet to result in a single documented death. De Blasio’s move is both premature and politicized.

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The Dobbs case went before the Supreme Court last week. Now we wait to see whether a majority of justices will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Most interesting was the contrast between the questioning of key justices. Justice Sotomayor, obviously pro-abortion, asked whether—if the court overturns Roe—it will “survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?”   

Justice Thomas, as clearly pro-life, took a different approach. He returned repeatedly to the truth that two lives are implicated in every pregnancy—asking counsel to distinguish between prohibiting an abortion and laws that forbid women from ingesting substances harmful to an unborn baby.

The contrast was revealing. Even as the pro-abortion side deplores the perception of politics, all it has are political arguments—no legal, much less moral ones. But in a world riddled with moral equivalence, the pro-life side saw a ringing reaffirmation of moral truth.

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High gasoline prices have hit working class families hard and contributed to the highest inflation rate in decades. Rather than fix the problem by reversing Joe Biden’s policies restricting American energy production, Pete Buttigieg laughed off the concerns. Fuel prices won’t matter, the Transportation Secretary told MSNBC, when everyone drives an electric vehicle.

What Buttigieg failed to explain is how we’ll be able to supply sufficient electricity to charge tens of millions of personal vehicles. States such as California already cannot meet demand for electricity for normal use, let alone the demand produced from millions of electronic vehicles. Decades of pressure to end fossil-fuel energy production have created a brittle electrical infrastructure, while years of promises to create “green” energy production on a similar scale have gone unfulfilled.

What happens when we shift that demand from highly scalable and dynamically priced gasoline (and diesel) to the price- and source-regulated grid? It will be a replay of the current supply-chain crisis, but on steroids.

The electricity shortages that follow will not just drain our personal vehicles but also our economy. It’s yet another policy disaster from the Biden administration.

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It’s long been clear Tony Fauci of the NIH is more of a politician than a scientist. No one thrives in the public health bureaucracy for 53 years without keen political instincts.

But this week, Fauci revealed himself as an open partisan. Ted Cruz called for him to be prosecuted over his links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci responded by alluding to January 6th—though there’s no evidence Cruz was involved in any way.

And that’s the problem in a nutshell. In service to his own ego, Fauci’s willing to score partisan points even if it means further squandering the good will and trust of at least half the country.

That gamesmanship only reinforces the growing sense that Tony Fauci is perfectly capable of ignoring both science and the public good to boost his own stature.

Fauci’s contradictory (and often misguided) health pronouncements may have kept him in the spotlight—but they’ve also caused enormous, needless suffering.

It’s time to hold him accountable for it.

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