Townhall Review | Commentaries

The Stormy Daniels “hush money” case against Donald Trump is an affront to our basic notions of American justice:

•    Gag orders are typically imposed to protect defendants and secure their right to an untainted jury. Here, the defendant—Trump—has been gagged, leaving him unable to defend himself.

•    Prosecutors are keeping the witness schedule secret until the eve of their testimony. That deprives the defense of the time needed to adequately prepare a cross examination. 

•    Finally, Daniels’ seamy testimony inevitably prejudices the jury against Trump—and it’s not even relevant to his alleged crime!

The end game is clear. Obtain a conviction of Donald Trump at any cost, —secure in the knowledge that when the verdict is overturned—and it will be—that will come after the election.

This isn’t justice. This is banana republic politics. And it’s a stain on America’s rule of law.

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Does the left believe in personal autonomy? When the topic is abortion, they claim to, but when the topic is vaccine mandates, they clearly do not. 

Do they believe in free expression? When the topic is antisemitic agitation on campus, they claim to, but when conservatives are intimidated off the same campuses, they clearly do not. 

Are they for public order? They claim to be when they hold endless hearings about the riots on Jan. 6, but when Antifa burns down cities, they clearly are not. 

It becomes a lot less confusing when you realize that leftism is not a coherent philosophy, and does not try to be philosophically consistent. Leftism is a revolt against the creation order. 

The left uses each of those tools selectively, only when they can be repurposed into weapons to blast away not just at our social order, but at the very created order of reality.

Let us hope the nation is learning.

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Americans have watched in horror as elite college campuses have roiled with antisemitic, pro-Palestinian protests. But let’s not kid ourselves—the protests are deeply anti-American, as well.

Fully $149 billion dollars of taxpayer money goes to American universities each year—including “private” ones. Columbia received $1.2 billion, Harvard got $676 million, and Princeton took in $403 million. Yet these schools are little more than indoctrination camps. They are literally teaching our young people to hate their country, the western tradition and all the values that have made our culture great.

It makes sense to support universities that educate young people. They equip the leaders of tomorrow with valuable skills and are an asset to any country.

But only a nation of fools would subsidize institutions that are radicalizing the next generation. It’s time to throw elite education off the gravy train.

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Angry that Israel wishes to win the war that Hamas and the Gazans started, Joe Biden announced that he would withhold weapons from Israel until they stop trying to attack Hamas where they have hidden themselves -- in Rafah. Just a couple of days after claiming to remember the victims of October 7, Biden wants to force Israel to let the perpetrators of the massacre off the hook.

While claiming to support Israel and oppose terrorism, Biden cited ‘civilian casualties’ as his reason for suspending the transfers. Hamas deliberately hides among civilian populations for this very reason, a war crime and a terror strategy that Biden has now validated by blaming Israel for the casualties. And Biden has done all this without any pressure on Hamas to return hostages, including Americans.

Three years ago, Biden betrayed our allies in Afghanistan. Now Biden wants to abandon American hostages and nine million Israelis to Hamas and Iran.

Biden is an utter disgrace.

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With the incredibly disturbing reports about anti-American, anti-Semitic agitation at Columbia and other prestigious universities across the nation, the reality has become undeniable: These institutions have lost their way. 

It didn’t just happen now. It happened over a long time. What happened now is that people who were in denial about it have been slapped in the face by reality. It’s time that conservative and Christian parents stop robotically sending their children for indoctrination at the “best” schools. 

They’re not the best schools. They’re the highest status schools and even that is disappearing before our eyes. 

At this point, the best schools are the schools which teach the best things: the true, the good, the beautiful. Think Hillsdale, Grove City, Liberty, Regent, Pepperdine and the list goes on. No more excuses. Stop offering your children’s minds and souls as sacrifices to the status hierarchy of the ruling class and as bragging points at dinner parties. 

We knew it all before. But the evidence now is overwhelming.

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What we are witnessing from New York State’s trial court judge, Justice Juan Merchan, is absolutely shocking, in an attempt to secure, by any means necessary, a conviction of former President Donald Trump.
 
Merchan is orchestrating a conviction of Trump for a crime that is not even charged in the indictment.
 
Only mind-readers can discern the real motives behind Justice Merchan’s incomprehensible abuses of his power. 
 
Unless one or more brave souls on the jury see through this fraud of a Soviet-style show trial and hangs the jury, many convictions are coming Trump’s way, and the Merchan/Alvin Bragg combo is going down in American legal history along with the names of every other disreputable judge and prosecutor you can find in American history. 
 
It is very unlikely that such a juror will emerge, given the rulings the judge has made.
 
We will not know this side of heaven what Merchan and Bragg thought they were doing. But what they have already done is enough to put them down in the column of those who put politics ahead of law, to the great and lasting detriment of the Republic.

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Why ask questions when you have no interest in the answers? The Associated Press just did a survey on the level of trust Americans have in the media. Only 14 percent of respondents claimed to have confidence in their reporting. 

By contrast, 83 percent had significant concerns over accuracy, three-fourths worried about bias and 81 percent were extremely or somewhat concerned that reporters don’t verify their information before publication.

Combined with similar outcomes from Gallup, the result should be a wake-up call for the AP and other media organizations. Instead, the AP blamed the erosion of trust to microscopic levels not on media organizations, but on “politicians,” and their consumers for being “not familiar with how journalism works.”

An industry that deals with failure on a scale this broad by attempting to blame its customers is an industry in total denial. And that tells us that the mainstream media will essentially do nothing to address the problem until the trust level drops all the way to zero.
It's not good.

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What Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg is doing in Manhattan in his contrived case against Donald Trump is appalling, and it will get worse before it gets better in terms of interference with the campaign in a trial that should never have been begun much less continued into the stretch run of the campaign. 

We are watching a show trial and everyone knows it. I expect a spectacular backlash from this abuse of the criminal law. Most Americans have due process in their bones and they know: Trump is not getting due process. 

They see the permanent government putting its thumb on the scale, or in this case, its entire fist on the scale.

Pray the rebuke Democrats receive in November is enough to reset the party back somewhere close to where the old-school liberals lived. We don’t need a two-party system where one party has lost its commitment to the rule of law and to our ally Israel. Democrats have abandoned them both. The reckoning is coming.

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One needn’t be a Donald Trump fan to understand that the “hush money” case being prosecuted against him in Manhattan is weak.

Conventional wisdom holds that keeping Trump tied up in a Manhattan courtroom helps Joe Biden, who’s struggling in the polls. It prevents Trump from being out on the campaign trail, talking to voters and making his case.

Yet most recent polls show that Trump has, in fact, expanded his lead over Biden.

Ironically, keeping Trump cooped up in a courtroom may actually be helping him, by involuntarily imposing message discipline on him. There isn’t as much time for him to talk and remind much of America why he drives them crazy.

All bets are off if a verdict comes in and Trump reacts in a way Americans find unacceptable. Until then, the left’s lawfare may actually have done Trump a favor.

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The dignity of the human, individual rights like freedom of speech and religion, women’s equality, reliable standards of right and wrong, openness to other cultures and their ideas—these were the markers of Western Civilization.  But the Marxists of the ’70s and ’80s saw an opening for their revolution, and foisted race onto to the notion of the West. White, everywhere, stood for oppression.

The chants of “Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go” in the ’80s were a success. Adults did themselves no favors when they dismissed college students’ odd ideologies, the defense of violence, euphemized with words like liberation, struggle and social justice.

We are witnessing a culmination. Those youth are now professors, filling key positions of leadership.

We are on the wrong road.

When you realize that, C.S. Lewis put it that: “progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

We could use that sort of progressive just about now.

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