Townhall Review | Commentaries

The GOP candidates for president are gearing up for the next debate later this month in Southern California.

I’m hoping we get something better than what we saw in Milwaukee last month.

What we saw then was a poorly moderated media circus, displaying just about everything wrong with American politics. 

The candidates played to a loud strategy that had little to do with advancing ideas. They just sought to build their brands and blast at their opponents. Furthermore, the candidate leading in the polls did not even show up.

There were very few moments worth remembering. The most urgent question discussed on that stage was abortion, and the candidates revealed a lack of candor and clarity on the most important moral issue of our times—at least some of them. 

It wasn’t really a debate at all. It was a show. 

Welcome to the Republican race for the White House. I need an Aspirin.

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Talk about irony. The people who claim to want to “save democracy” are trying to ban Donald Trump from the ballot in 2024. They claim that he’s ineligible under the 14th Amendment’s Disqualifications Clause, which holds that anyone who has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” can’t hold office without a two-thirds vote of each house of Congress.

On its face, the argument makes no sense. Trump hasn’t even been charged with—much less convicted of—insurrection or rebellion. It’s ludicrous to try to shoehorn a constitutional provision drafted for Civil War rebels to fit a protest that turned into a riot.

Whether you like Trump or hate him—or are somewhere in between—this is blatant election interference. The maneuver is a clear effort to deprive the American people of the right to make their own choice for President. And it shows that Trump’s enemies lack confidence in their own ability to beat him, fair and square.

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If you haven’t heard much about Covid lately, you will.  There’s a rising call for a new push on vaccinations and masking.  A recent headline out of Washington, DC: “COVID-19 raises anxiety at start of new school year,” and Anthony Fauci was on CNN this past week to promote masks once again—even against the overwhelming evidence they don’t work against Covid and have negative consequences.

The studies are in as to what we did with children—catastrophizing them, using them to soothe adult anxieties, disrupting their natural education and recreational environments, covering their faces, pitting one against the other.  This unleashed a massive youth mental health crisis.  All for a virus that did not pose a significant risk for them.

The Covid fear mongers have nothing to say about how wrong they were, ignoring research over the harm they have done, all-the-while willing to do it all over again. 

The real crisis here is the adult mental health crisis at play. 

That, regarding Covid, should be our concern

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The coming trial in Georgia of former president Donald Trump and as many as 18 co-defendants will be the first “trial of the century” of the new millennium. The time to think about media coverage of it is now. 

“Trial of the century” was a pretty elastic phrase in the sensationalist 20th century. The question of Darwinism in the trial of John Scopes wore the mantle, as did the trial of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. They were eclipsed by the unprecedented mass coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial following the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. 

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee has no idea what is about to swamp him, because, well, nobody does. But he could learn a lot from a phone call to retired Los Angeles judge Lance Ito, who presided over the “trial of the century” that held Americans spellbound in the mid-1990s. 

Judge McAfee ought to give us a big and diverse set of eyes on the proceedings. Credential a few writer writers. Put them in there every day, like Dominick Dunne—and we will see. 

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Transparency is key to government accountability.

But bureaucrats at the National Institutes of Health—the NIH—have steadfastly opposed transparency. Their leaders, Anthony Fauci and Lawrence Tabak, resisted sharing the names of companies that have paid NIH scientists third party royalties. But a lawsuit by nonprofit Open the Books has finally forced transparency on NIH.

We now know that NIH scientists collected some $325 million dollars in third party royalties between 2009 and 2020. Companies including pharmaceutical firms controlled by the Chinese Communist Party paid NIH to license technologies developed with US tax dollars.

Last year alone, NIH handed out $30 billion in government grants to fifty-six thousand  recipients. Over the years, that taxpayer funded bounty apparently returned to NIH and its scientists in the form of royalty payments.

What a cozy system. No wonder they don’t want us to know.

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Consider how this country would react if two commercial airlines were crashing into each other over our skies every single day.  It’d be the number one story and the number one national crisis.  Now think about deaths due to dangerous and illegal drug use. That’s the number we’re losing: Over 110,000 Americans died from drug use last year. It’s the number one killer of young adults. In fact, more Americans under 50 died from drug poisonings last year than all Americans under 50 died from Covid in the past three years.

In the 1980s and 90s, we had a major drug problem, and with impactful prevention messaging we reduced the problem over 60 percent.  Then we let up, and it’s much worse today.

We need to be serious about the border and we need to be serious about prevention messaging.  

When we do care about a health problem, this country sure knows how to message it. 

It’s long past time we do it with illegal and dangerous drugs too.

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Fitch, one of the Big Three Credit Rating Services has recently downgraded the credit rating of the U.S. government. Now the rating is still high, we're not a junk bond yet, but this is still a concern. 

The media spun it as a response to Republican brinksmanship over the debt ceiling. Yet Fitch mentioned … well … how high our debt is. The Biden administration said the call was made based on outdated information, but the most recent information is even more damning as the Congressional Budget Office once again has raised its prediction of our long-term debt outlook. 

The reality is that rating agencies have been too slow, not too fast, to blow the whistle. Credit rating agencies depend directly on recognition by federal regulators. The SEC can put them out of business like that. They have every incentive to cut the Feds some slack, which means they only cut the rating when the case to do so is strong. Our government needs to get serious about cutting spending and stop attacking the messengers. 

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Not long ago, we learned there are Chinese Communist Party police stations here in America — operating in New York, California, Texas, Nebraska and Minnesota. 

They’re surveilling and oppressing Chinese nationals in our country in ways that transgress American norms.

If that weren’t bad enough—and it is!—late last month an illegal Chinese bio-lab was discovered in the San Joaquin Valley of California. Along with 900 mice genetically engineered to carry Covid-19, a variety of infectious agents were found at the lab.

These included both bacterial and viral agents such as: chlamydia, E. Coli, streptococcus pneumonia, hepatitis B and C, herpes 1 and 5 and rubella. There were also samples of malaria.

How many more labs like this exist?

And why isn’t there a robust American response to this Chinese treachery—both from our leaders and in the press?

It’s past time to address mounting Chinese aggression. 

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Last week’s GOP debate in Milwaukee was quite the gift to Joe Biden.

The President must be amazed at his good fortune.

In this first debate, the Biden-orchestrated fiasco in Afghanistan of two years ago came up only fleetingly. His appeasement of the Chinese Communist Party and its dictator for life, Xi Jinping, barely rated a whisper. And not a word was spoken about the left’s sustained assault on the Supreme Court and the mortal threat it poses to the rule of law.

Instead of calling viewers’ attention to Biden’s disastrous first term and why, for the good of the nation, Biden must be denied a second one, the Republican candidates mostly agreed with each other—but did so in a combative way that will serve only to further divide an already divided GOP primary electorate.

Talk about missed opportunities. 

The seriousness of this moment for America, and for the world, did not come through at all.

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It’s back to school season across the nation. The festivities here at Arizona State University included a group called Students for the Socialist Revolution. At their recruiting table, they erected a large red banner, featuring a huge picture of Karl Marx, complete with the hammer and sickle. One of their members cut a video for the public, calling herself “comrade” and asked fellow “Bolsheviks” to join her organization.

Nobody raised an eyebrow. 

Earlier this year, Dennis Prager was invited to ASU, and a large group of faculty condemned him, calling him a white nationalist … and organizers lost their jobs.  

Why are we so blithe about communism, never mind communist revolution? Communist states and leaders are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of innocents—and yet the campus is up in arms over Dennis Prager?

And: Barely a peep when self-identified Marxists embrace the hammer and sickle and the language of revolution.

We have our work cut out for us.

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