Townhall Review | Commentaries

The FAA—the Federal Aviation Administration—is central to the safety of anyone who flies. Among a variety of other functions, it operates the navigation and air traffic control systems and handles all the programs related to aviation safety.

Common sense would dictate that those charged with such jobs need to be of sound mind and body. But the FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer from psychiatric disorders, severe intellectual disabilities and other mental and physical conditions.

The scheme is part of the agency’s “Diversity and Inclusion” recruiting efforts. The FAA claims the resulting workforce will enable the FAA to ensure safe and efficient travel.

Of course, no evidence is offered for this assertion — but DEI isn’t ever about results. It’s about faith in what its adherents believe is a greater good.

Unfortunately, that’s not a comforting thought the next time you climb onto an airplane.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ultra-liberal New York Congressman, Jerry Nadler, just made a very strange case for illegal immigration.

He recently said: “Forget the fact that the farm that our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants—many illegal immigrants—the fact is that the birthrate in this country is way below replacement level, which means our population is going to start shrinking. And the ratio of people on Social Security and Medicare is going to increase relative to the number of people supporting them.”

What's notable about that isn't that he wants more illegal immigration, what's notable is that he, a liberal Democrat, acknowledges that we have an underpopulation problem. So we don't face a population bomb? We don't need to shrink global population to sustainable levels? Our economy actually needed the 70 million people we’ve aborted since Roe?

It’s nice to hear a lefty admit to the reality of demographic winter even if only for a moment and in the service of lawlessness. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Former President Trump logged a blowout win in Iowa—the first contest of the GOP primary contest for presidency in 2024.
 
And with it we got continued cries from elite media outlets:
 
“Tyranny approaches! Despotism is just off stage! Guillotines are being sharpened!”
 
Well, no one actually said that guillotines are being sharpened, but that specific red light warning may have simply not made it past the editors of the river of op-eds warnings about the return of Donald Trump appearing in recent weeks in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, The Hill or the entire issue of The Atlantic. 
 
The hysteria would be amusing—indeed it’s already amusing to some—if it weren’t both predictable and boring. 
 
It’s also not believable. 
 
If anyone genuinely believes that Donald Trump is a “threat to democracy” they have either drunk the Kool-Aid or spilled it on their copies of the Constitution—that is a silly alarm, one that should be laughed at, not indulged. 
 
The Constitution is very strong. 
 
Pay no attention to the media-empowered alarmists.
 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s a big week at the Supreme Court. Today, the justices are hearing today two big cases that could mark the beginning of the end of four decades of bureaucratic overreach.

In 1984, the Chevron decision held that federal agencies could rely on a presidential administration’s policy views to resolve ambiguities in federal laws.

The problem with this approach is that the Constitution vests legislative power in our Congress—not in administrative agencies staffed by unelected bureaucrats.

The Loper Bright Enterprises and Relentless cases give the Supreme Court an opportunity to make that point clear. It’s also chance to return lawmaking to leaders that voters can hold accountable.

Chief Justice Roberts, and Justices Alito, Gorsuch and Thomas have previously expressed concerns with the Chevron case. It takes only one more vote to put lawmaking back where it belongs—in the hands of elected officials.

Let’s hope that happens.

We’ll be watching closely.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You never know what under-attended story will explode into a series of major events—just consider the beginning of World War I.
 
Fox News reported on Monday that two U.S. Navy SEALs went missing.  They were boarding an Iranian flagged ship or an Iranian armed ship in the Gulf of Aden, searching for illegally smuggled weapons to arm the Houthis.
 
This story will develop, but we should not take our eyes off it.  As we should not take our eyes off any part of Iran—the chief threat to civilization right now.  Iran arms Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and has killed hundreds of Americans over the years, even trying to explode a bomb in Washington, DC.
 
Meanwhile, President Biden has been sending Iran more and more money and been begging them to negotiate.  But Iran does not want to negotiate, as Goldfinger said to James Bond, they want us to die.  A strong and clear-headed American president would understand this and prevent it. 
 
President Biden is not that president.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We enter the presidential primary cycle with former President Trump—according to polling—the overwhelming favorite for the GOP nomination.®
 
If he, indeed, quickly wraps up the GOP nomination, Trump should shift immediately into general campaign mode. He needs to make news and set an agenda—apart from stories that will swirl from his various court proceedings.
 
An obvious—and compelling—tactic is for him to repeat and expand the great innovation of his 2016 campaign: the list, where he put out a list of his potential Supreme Court nominees—the one’s he would consider to fill the vacancy created by the death of Justice Scalia. 
 
In this cycle, if Trump names his VP selection early—his running mate—and then announces intentions on his potential appointees for crucial jobs in the cabinet and the White House,  he’ll impress upon the electorate the seriousness of the times via the seriousness of his potential cabinet and senior staff.
 
Democrats will be left chanting “threat to democracy” as Trump lays out an agenda—and the people he is likely to ask to carry it out.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Claudine Gay has now stepped down as Harvard’s president—though she will still collect the same hefty $900,000 salary.

Attempting to salvage Gay’s reputation, her supporters have accused her critics of hypocrisy. They argue Claudine Gay’s detractors attributed her promotion to her race and gender, and now are using her ouster to undermine DEI efforts.

The claim is just projection. It’s Gay’s supporters who are guilty of race conscious behavior. When Gay was named president of Harvard, it was her fans who emphasized her sex and color. She was forced out for reasons having nothing to do with either.

Gay’s fans charge that her critics want a world where she can’t win because of her immutable characteristics. Actually, they want one where she can’t lose because of them. Either would be noxious, discounting individual choices and abilities in favor of stereotypes and group rights.

That’s not the American way.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Antony Blinken traveled to Ramallah this week to repeat demands for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This ignores the evidence of October 7 in both Gaza and the West Bank that Palestinians are only interested in a single state—and the annihilation of Israel.

Any discussions of a Palestinian state are useless as long as the Palestinians refuse to accept Israel as a permanent Jewish state on present borders. Both Fatah and Hamas refuse to negotiate in good faith on that basis. The Gazans just proved on October 7 that they are far more interested in committing genocide in Israel than in peace. So too are Palestinians in the West Bank, where support for Hamas after the massacres has become nearly universal.

The US should make that futility crystal clear to Mahmoud Abbas. Only that will prompt new polities within their populations, new polities that deal rationally with the reality of Israel and the necessity of accommodation. Until they do, the Israelis have no partner for any two-state solution.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Joe Biden kicked off campaign season with a fiery speech claiming that democracy itself is on the ballot this year. He’s absolutely right—though not in the way he intended.

Biden was disparaging his likely opponent, Donald Trump. But there’s never been a more autocratic administration than his own. It sought to censor Americans’ lawful speech on the internet. It sicced the FBI both on parents who complained at school board meetings and on traditional Catholic churches, in a hunt for supposed domestic radicals.

None of this is how our democratic republic has ever worked. Nor has any president so blatantly broken American immigration law, allowing eight million illegal immigrants to overwhelm our southern border.

It’s certainly unprecedented for any president to try to imprison his top political opponent, destroy his business, and have him thrown off the ballot.

America, indeed, faces a crisis of democracy. But it’s not coming from Donald Trump.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It needs saying, again: the world is a dangerous place.  The question is whether we’ll make it more dangerous or less, by what we do and don’t, by who we support or don’t.  And when.  And how.

For 45 years, Iran has been at war against the United States—taking American hostages, killing Americans, targeting allies—directly and via proxies. Its most lethal proxy is Hezbollah—whose Manifesto makes it clear: America is their number one target. And now Israel, our ally, is called upon to fight Hezbollah. We’d better be clear where we are on this front, too.

We should not be sleepwalking as danger is exploding everywhere—not just the Middle East. This very moment is, as Paul Harvey once said, a testing time.  

One can fail tests.  In foreign policy, that’s how world wars start.

Right now, our grade is not good.  We’d better wake up from our lethal slumber and fix it!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.