Townhall Review | Commentaries

Call it the shortest and strangest challenge to Vladimir Putin’s power in his strongman regime. Yevgeny Prigozhin – a man elevated by Putin from caterer to warlord – was one day’s march from Moscow with some 25,000 battle-hardened mercenaries behind him. Putin, who has all of his army committed to a failing conquest of Ukraine, looked ripe for a fall.

Only a last-minute deal brokered by Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko averted a civil war – for now. Despite accusing Prigozhin and his commanders of treason, Putin allowed them to leave Russia along with thousands of his soldiers. All of this makes Putin look much weaker, and the Russian war even more precarious than before. 

And that is a worrisome development. Putin has been a threat to world peace and stability for decades, but the alternatives at the moment are worse. Prigozhin himself was little more than a brutal warlord who saw an opening to seize power. The West had better start preparing for what could be a catastrophic collapse in Moscow.

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George Gilder’s new book “Life After Capitalism” is a powerful warning. 

Gilder was the living author most quoted by President Reagan and he is still going strong. His newest book lays out two possible futures for us:  

One is for us to realize that capitalism is not a system which runs on greed, but rather on knowledge. Allowing entrepreneurs to take chances and learn from both success and failure is the chief driver of human knowledge and flourishing. That future is brighter than we can imagine, with blockchain, incredibly strong new building materials, life-prolonging gene therapies and AI which works for humans. 

But life after capitalism can be another path: the socialistic destruction of knowledge, sinking into decline and despair. Think Covid lockdowns but worse, the lockdown of all human progress. It's not too late to choose knowledge and progress. Gilder’s book offers us what we need most, a positive vision of the future. 

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Back in feminism’s heyday, Helen Reddy sang “I am woman, hear me roar” and Virginia Slims told women “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

No longer. 

In fact, women as a sex are now literally being defined out of existence. Johns Hopkins University has updated its online glossary of LGBTQ terms to define a lesbian as “A non-man attracted to non-men.” 

The justification was that non-binary people might also consider themselves lesbians. But this episode isn’t the first example of gender radicals seeking to define women out of existence. Remember all the ridiculous euphemisms like “chest feeding” and “people who give birth”?

The Johns Hopkins dictionary has been taken down after eliciting outrage and well-deserved mockery. But save some ridicule for feminists like Gloria Steinem and Emma Watson, who’ve suddenly gone silent. Their devotion to women’s rights, apparently, doesn’t extend to ensuring everyone actually knows what a woman is.

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What did Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Loretta Lynch, and James Comey know about Russia-collusion — and when did they know it? John Durham dropped a bombshell in his testimony to the House Oversight Committee. In his report, the special counsel had already revealed that these four and others had been briefed in August 2016 that the Russia-collusion allegation was nothing more than a political attack from Hillary Clinton. 

Durham testified that the briefing had included a “referral memorandum” that Comey received. However, Durham discovered that FBI agents assigned to the investigation were never informed of Brennan’s briefing or the political context of the Steele dossier. In essence, Comey obstructed the FBI’s own investigation and contributed to the false representations to the FISA court.

Comey isn’t the only one that covered it up. Obama, Biden, and Lynch all contributed to the Russia hysteria that followed, both before and after the election, while knowing full well that it was nothing but a dirty political trick.

That certainly smells like … well … collusion.

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Target Corporation has been on the wrong path for some time. Caving to sexual identity activists on bathroom policy, banning books, promoting policies which undermine religious freedom and now perhaps the most ill-advised product roll-out in retail history: some 2,000 products for Pride Month, including clothing from a designer who praises Satan with stuff like Bible Girl: 666 tee shirts and girls bathing suits designed for boys. 

Customers were outraged and the company has lost billions in market value. 

The company says they are making changes. But the CEO has no one to blame but himself. 

He lists “reputational management” as one of his areas of responsibility on his corporate bio. How in the world could a CEO be so out of touch with their customers that they have to schedule emergency meetings to deal with the crisis they’ve created? 

We need to continue telling the company what we think—with our dollars and with our voices. 

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Attorney General Merrick Garland needs to explain the timing of the indictment of former president Trump.

How many months will pass from Donald Trump’s arraignment on June 13, before a verdict in what might well be the trial of this century? —the unprecedented federal criminal prosecution of a former president. 

The trial of O.J. Simpson, for those of you who can’t remember, took 16 months. That would mean the nation would be learning Trump’s fate a matter of weeks before Election Day, with the accused very possibly on the 2024 presidential ballot.

The idea that the Justice Department is flirting with this possibility is astonishing. Prosecutors had other options but chosen this … two months before the Republican debates begin.

My concerns are focused on the 31 counts concerning the documents and the Espionage Act. Was Trump’s possession of those documents so dangerous to national security that the former commander in chief must be put into the dock and face a prison sentence of more than 300 years?—all in the midst of nation’s quadrennial election cycle?

The damage from all this is going to be very difficult to undo.

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Great Britain’s National Health Service has just banned the use of puberty blockers for treating gender dysphoria, noting they’re just not reversible. Apparently, Britain shares the misgivings about so called “gender affirming” treatment for minors expressed already by Sweden, Finland, Norway and France.

Increasingly, the US medical community is an outlier in its enthusiasm for medicalizing and performing life altering surgeries on vulnerable children.

It’s dismaying that socialized health systems have led the way in protecting minors.

The benefit of a private system is that it puts citizens, rather than government, in control of health care.

How awful if, instead, fragile children are being pushed to make irreversible choices at tender ages to advance a sexual and moral agenda while putting fat profits in drug companies’ and surgeons’ pockets. 

Not only would it violate the Hippocratic oath — it would confirm the left’s darkest suspicions of capitalism.

We need to pull back.

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The federal indictment of Donald Trump has prompted anger over the double standard employed by the Department of Justice. Trump followers see this as an extension of nearly seven years of politicized prosecutions, starting with the two-year Russia collusion hoax. The federal indictment of a political rival to a sitting president is not just unprecedented, but portends an endless cycle of vendettas in the years ahead.

Republican primary contenders have raised all of these concerns. One, however, has a plan to break that cycle and depoliticize law enforcement. A well-timed leak from the Ron DeSantis campaign reveals the Florida governor’s plan to decentralize and relocate the Department of Justice to keep the Beltway from unduly influencing its operation. DeSantis also plans to reorganize the FBI and to rid the bureau of its most political actors.

It needs to be more fully developed, but it’s the first substantive policy solution to this crisis.

Republicans can—and should—choose to solve the problem rather than perpetuate the cycle of vengeance.

America needs a fresh start.

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There is probably no investment company more associated with ESG than Blackrock, the world’s largest asset manager. Here’s a refresher on ESG—Environment, Social and Governance. It’s a means by which firms which control the investment funds use those funds to take your money and use it to vote to impose a progressive political agenda on the companies you invest in. 

It’s politics pretending to be finance. 

But people caught on to what was going on and have revolted against Blackrock’s ESG agenda. They elected state financial and legal officers who pushed back against it and in many cases have fired companies like Blackrock which have been pushing ESG. 

I recently attended Blackrock’s annual meeting: Larry Fink, the CEO, did not mention ESG once during his prepared remarks. These companies are beginning to feel the pressure. I don’t believe they've actually changed, but the outflow of assets is being felt. 

Keep up the pressure. 

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The Chris Licht Era at CNN came to an abrupt halt just thirteen months after it began. Licht faced an organization in crisis after Jeff Zucker’s removal, and did little to correct either its ratings or its credibility.

Licht had implemented a strategy designed to return CNN to the center and oriented toward hard-news reporting. It became clear, even before a devastating profile in The Atlantic, that Licht never got his organization to buy into his strategy. His decision to air a town hall event with Donald Trump as a Republican presidential candidate provoked a rebellion among the staff. That—along with the lack of ratings—doomed Licht.

At this point, it’s worth asking the question: Do cable-net viewers really want hard news without a point of view? Licht’s failure might suggest that news audiences prefer entertainment and self-validation to straight news. 
Or, perhaps it was that Licht and CNN weren’t capable of producing either.

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