Townhall Review | Commentaries

Larry Kudlow is Director of the National Economic Council, which makes him President Trump’s chief economic advisor. But in his recent CPAC speech, Kudlow gave some advice directly to the American people. He asked us to put socialism on trial.

What a great idea.

C.S. Lewis wrote an essay called “God in the Dock.” The “dock” is the defendant’s seat in British trials. His point was that modern man puts God on trial, whereas our forebears properly saw man as on trial. The people who put God on trial also tend to put freedom on trial.

Conservatives have offered effective defenses of economic freedom, but Kudlow is right: It’s time to put godless socialism in the dock, in the defendant’s seat. I choose as witness number one and number two, two forms of socialism – communism and fascism.

What do you have to say for yourselves, socialists?

We’ll await your defense.

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The televised Michael Cohen hearings of the House Oversight and Reform Committee showed that the two political parties not only differ in their attitudes toward president Trump, but offer a stark contrast in the demographics they represent.

Of the Democrats on the committee, 19 of 25—76 percent—were women or people of color or both. Democrats will never build a durable majority without doing better among white males, who still represent a full third of the electorate. Meanwhile, Republicans have the opposite problem: on the committee, they were nearly all white males—17 of 18—joining one white female from North Carolina.

The bigger GOP problem was regional imbalance: more than 70 percent of committee Republicans hailed from Southern states, and a party that is visibly dominated by just one part of the country has a problem in both public perceptions and balance.

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The sexualization of children will be televised.

It’s on “Good Morning America” where an 11-year-old drag queen dances provocatively to the approval of the hosts and studio audience alike.

It’s on Hulu in the form in the series “Pen15” with behavior I can’t describe here.

Gore Vidal would be a prude by the standards of today’s culture.

In 2015, an admitted pedophile argued in Salon.com that, “Society preventing children from engaging in sex play and romance is akin to preventing them from learning to swim.”

Today, New York state legislators respond to sex trafficking by introducing legislation to legalize prostitution.

The social justice response to sex abuse by Catholic clergy is to remove the celibacy vow and prohibitions on homosexuality for priests.

The response to the latest sexual abuse charges against R. Kelly is for his attorney to assert an implicit consent defense—for preying on 14-year-old kids.

The sexual revolution is on the cusp of conquering its final frontier.

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With all eyes on the Vatican, the meeting on Catholic clergy sex abuse ended with no concrete policy developments. As The New York Times reports, “For all the vivid language and the vow to combat this evil that strikes at the very heart of our mission, the Pope’s speech was short on the sort of detailed battle plan demanded by many Catholics around the world.”

So: The really surprising development in all this was the lack of any development in concrete policies. Nicholas Cafardi, a prominent canon lawyer in the United States said, “The Pope is the sole legislator, so he could make this change wherever he wants. Zero tolerance … should be universal law. And the Holy Father can do it himself.”

But attendees did not even hear the term “zero tolerance” from the Pope.

The Pope fails to understand the gravity of the charges that had been made for decades against the Roman Catholic Church.

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On Tuesday this week, the U.S. Senate failed to pass legislation that would protect the lives of children born alive, that would have prevented and made illegal infanticide after a botched abortion. It should be inconceivable that such an event would happen in the United States Senate, but it did happen.

It was both tragic and telling.

A bare majority—53 senators—voted in favor of the legislation, but 44 opposed it. Given the filibuster rules in the Senate, 60 votes were needed for the measure to proceed to the Senate floor for a full vote.

From time to time legislation—by virtue of the fact that it passes or fails to pass—offers something of a diagnostic test of the moral condition of the United States, of its people and its culture. Something like a moral MRI or CAT scan. What the scan revealed this week is chilling: What you see is the culture of death staring back at us ominously.

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With four cities permitting 16-year old voting and several states considering it, what we have not known is how they might vote. Thanks to a study by the Pew Foundation, now we do and it’s troubling.

In short, younger people agree with their older millennial brothers and sisters, only more so, and they disagree with their boomer parents and silent generation grandparents. 70 percent of 13-21 year olds think government should be doing more, compared with an average 44% of boomers.

Only 30 percent support Trump, compared to an average 48 percent of older groups. They are the most pessimistic about the future of the country. We already know they are much more accepting of socialism.

This feels like more than the old pattern where young people start out more liberal but grow conservative over time. It sounds an alarm for more civic education and making a better case for capitalism.

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Critics of the Republican tax reform package argue that it benefited Wall Street and the ultra-wealthy but not Main Street and the middle class. But recent data show that this is almost exactly the opposite of the truth.

Though the large stock indices are up slightly since the implementation of the tax cut at the beginning of 2018, the real effects of the cuts have been felt in massive job creation.

The latest employment report showed over 300k jobs created in just one month. The latest jobs opening report showed that for the first time in the history of this statistic, there are more job openings than job seekers.

As the tax cut was working its way through Congress, I warned that America's employment problem was about to go from a labor glut to a labor shortage.

That’s where we are now—at full employment. The next challenge is getting people ready for those jobs.

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Martina Navratilova is a name familiar to the nation as the as the winner Wimbledon Women’s Singles title nine times, but she’s in the headlines today because she’s a gay athlete who is now accused of running headlong in conflict with the moral revolutionaries.

No: It’s not about gay rights, but over transgender identity and modern sport.

Late last year Navratilova got in trouble by tweeting, “You can’t just proclaim yourself a female and be able to compete against women.”

After a major backlash, she says she went back to consider the issue, to make sure that she really understood what she was talking about. Now she’s published a piece in the Sunday Times of London—“The Rules on Trans Athletes Reward Cheats and Punish the Innocent.”

She writes: “As I have gone into this with further detail and with further research I believe in my position even more strongly.”

But the revolution has moved past her, and the LGBTQ activists now say she’s on the wrong side of history.

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It’s amazing that more than 70 House members and a dozen senators have already signed onto the Green New Deal. I say amazing for two reasons:

(1) It is full of doom and gloom, and
(2) will cost a staggering $90 billion and counting.

The original New Deal of the 1930s was a response to the tragedy of a worldwide Great Depression. With a strong economy and low unemployment, it is difficult to paint that kind of bleak picture today, but the recent House Resolution introducing the Green New Deal surely tries, describing economic stagnation for four decades; racial, economic and gender divisions; and a planet doomed by global warming. It sounds a lot like Jimmy Carter’s old era of limits and we know how well that worked.

Democrats are lurching to the left in what feels like a desperate, but actually alienating, effort to win votes.

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The horrors of abortion appear daily as states across the country pledge their support for late-term abortion laws. And, with the recent change in New York’s law legalizing abortion right up to the point of birth, we see virtually immediate real-world impact.

The ink was barely dry on New York’s “Reproductive Health Act” when the New York Times reported that, after Governor Cuomo’s signing of the bill, “anti-abortion campaigners predicted it would eliminate criminal penalties for violence that ends women’s pregnancies. The debate resurfaced over the weekend after the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, cited the new law … as the reason for dropping an abortion charge against a man who the police say fatally stabbed his former girlfriend when she was 14 weeks pregnant.”

The speed of the moral revolution is dizzying: Just days after the passage of this abortion law, the criminal justice system dropped its case to protect the life of the unborn.

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