Townhall Review | Commentaries

President Biden recently tied together three active national security threats for the United States—the war in Israel, the war in Ukraine, and the crisis on the American border. Almost as soon as he said it, I think President Biden regretted saying it, but he was right. 

House Republicans heard him and have been insisting that real changes be made in border security. In the name of migration and claims of amnesty, thousands of people are coming into the United States every day—and they’re coming without legal permission. In just one day last week, we saw 11,000 such entries. Again, 11,000 persons coming into the United States across the border… in a single day. 

The border is out of control.

Republican ranks have closed around this issue, using their leverage to do something about the border. 

Note this: A nation that doesn’t control its borders is a nation that undermines its own security. Republicans are absolutely right to call for real change.

We have to regain control of our own border.

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Just as 9/11’s terrible toll changed America, so too the terrible toll of Hamas’s October 7 terrorist attack has changed Israel. The savagery, the magnitude, the horrors of the rapes, the torture, the mutilation of the dead—has shocked and traumatized Israel.

But the Jewish state is far from paralyzed. With a cold fury, it has acted on the imperative to restore deterrence. This war will not be short. And it is unlikely to be limited to Gaza. Rocket attacks by Hezbollah might soon prompt strong measures to restore security in the north.

Israel will not … cannot … allow terror encampments to remain within striking distance of their civilians living in the nation’s north and its south.

And: stronger than ever is their resolve that Iran must never be permitted to gain the ability to produce a nuclear weapon. 

Let those who have ears to hear, hear:

Israel will not wait for another October 7 before it acts.

The United States should fully aid its ally in that effort.

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Joe Biden spent last week reminding Israelis and Americans of the famous observation by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. That is: Our president has been on the wrong side of every foreign policy issue for four decades. Last week alone, the White House had to walk back Biden’s claim that the IDF was conducting “indiscriminate” bombing, and that Israel had only “weeks, not months” to finish the war with Hamas. 

Even worse, the White House keeps insisting on reviving their “two-state solution” demand at a time when the Palestinian quasi-state in Gaza conducted the worst single-day massacre of Jews since World War II. Hamas has repeatedly pledged since to repeat the October 7 barbarities as often as needed to conquer Israel. 

Israeli officials across the political spectrum made it clear to Biden last week:

The two-state solution is dead among their people after the massacres. 

Biden’s insistence on discussing it only demonstrates the wisdom of Gates’ warning:

Biden is good at getting it wrong.

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No wonder Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and other big government union leaders wield so much power in Washington. According to a new report by the Commonwealth Foundation, the four largest government unions dumped more than $700 million dollars into Democratic causes and campaigns — in just the last election cycle.

The contributions from these government union political action committees—or PACs—made up about 40 percent of political spending. And that spending was anything but even-handed. In the 2021-22 election cycle, more than 99 percent of their federal PAC and 95 percent of state PAC contributions went to Democrats.

The government bureaucracy, otherwise known as the “administrative state,” was created to be a nonpartisan class of government experts. Powered by the PACs and the membership fees of government unions, it's instead become a hyper-partisan political arm of the Democrats.

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The moral rot starts at the top.

In recent days, university presidents from three elite refused to say that calls on their campuses for the genocide of the Jewish people would violate their school’s code of conduct.

I’m referring to the congressional testimony from the leaders of Harvard, MIT and the University of Penn.

The moral confusion,  secularization, radicalization, the ideological corruption of American higher education has never been more evident. Those three women failed a basic moral test, and let's face it, they failed it publicly and catastrophically. Indeed, they steadfastly resisted making any categorical statement against calls for the mass murder of the Jewish people. 

This tells us a great deal about the rot of America's higher education. It also underlines the incongruity of how so many Christian parents and students think it would be a great achievement to get into those universities. 

Why are so many parents ready and eager to surrender their offspring to a moral swamp? 

Christian parents, when it comes to these schools and increasingly elite American education—keep your children far, far away. 

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Americans watched in horrified disbelief as the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified before Congress last week. The leaders of three of the most prestigious universities in the country revealed themselves as inept, morally bankrupt frauds, as they danced around whether campus calls for genocide constitute harassment.

This is a moment of maximum peril for elite universities, which rely on reputations earned decades ago. Essentially, they run on prestige.

If Americans sense they’re choosing their students by the same flawed methods they’re using to choose their leaders, the prestige that sustains them is very much in jeopardy.

And that’s exactly what’s going on. Elite universities pretend to be meritocracies when that’s no longer the case. They’ve decided to privilege Marxism and “intersectionality”—cloaked as DEI—above merit. That’s their prerogative, but the results were evident at the recent hearing. And they weren’t impressive.

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Disney just filed its annual form 10-k with the Securities and Exchange Commission—and it contains some stunning admissions. 

The company acknowledges that it is having problems with declining profitability because their content is increasingly out of step with consumer preferences. They also admit their politicking may be hurting the company's brand. 

But didn't we know that already? What's new here? 

What's new is that the company is admitting it in an official document registered with a powerful regulatory authority. 

To this point, Disney has tried to spin us with stories which avoid the core problem. The problem wasn’t too many Marvel sequels. The problem is that most of them pandered to progressive causes.

It's one thing to try to spin the press. It's another thing to mislead the SEC, which has severe legal consequences. In other words, Disney pretty much had to tell the truth this time. 

Now it's time to hold them accountable. Now shareholders have the right, indeed the duty, to talk to the company. 

Seize that opportunity!

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“We think there’s about eight hostages that are Americans,” John Kirby told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos this week. Two weeks earlier, Biden claimed that his brokering of the hostages for prisoners deal with Israel showed focus on the safety of Americans. Biden also claimed that the four-day ‘pause’ showed his determination to “bring Americans home.”

In eight days of exchanges, however, only one American got released.

Despite brokering the deal, it never included any guarantees that the nine Americans would be released unharmed, nor did it require Hamas to allow Red Cross access to Americans they kidnapped. At the same time, Biden and his team neglected to arrange for the exit of over a thousand Americans from Gaza.

Kirby now wants Israel to enter another pause to get the rest of the Americans out. We should be asking why Biden didn’t arrange for that in the first set of exchanges? … and why Biden and his team have made a habit of abandoning Americans to terrorist groups—first in Afghanistan and now in Gaza.

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Elon Musk said some incautious things on Twitter recently. That's not much of a surprise. Musk is an irascible genius, with no filter and a bit of a Twitter addiction. 

But the reaction was terribly disproportionate, with widespread but spurious charges of anti-Semitism and then a wave of boycotts by Apple, Disney, Comcast, IBM and others. 

But according to the Claremont Institute's BLM funding database: three of those companies have pledged roughly half a billion dollars to BLM and related causes. And BLM has been associated with Hamas cheerleading and a cals to end the nation of Israel. Musk deleted the tweet, visited Israel and made perfectly clear: He’s no antisemite. And yet the boycotts continue. Companies are right to consider reputational risk. 

But boycotting the world's richest man who owns a gigantic megaphone for spurious reasons is risky. So is entangling your brand with Hamas' genocidal allies. 

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So-called “women’s groups” have always claimed to speak for women and defend their interests. Now we know these claims were a hypocritical sham.
Feminist women’s groups have lost all legitimacy by failing to denounce Hamas’ use of rape and sexual violence against women as a weapon of war.
What Hamas has done to Israeli women is beyond horrific. Take just one example: One Israeli woman, described as having the “face of an angel,” was gang-raped by eight to ten men. She begged to be killed, before being shot in the back of the head. 

Her rapists laughed.

A State Department spokesman admitted Hamas likely refuses to release female hostages because they’ll tell of the grotesque sexual atrocities committed against them.

Still the “women’s groups”—including the UN’s arm for women’s empowerment—remain far too silent. They’re appalling.

It’s time to reassert the moral standard against violence against women in war.

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