Townhall Review | Commentaries

Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned not to live by lies. He wrote: the only way a tyranny can exist is by lies.  If we don’t reject lies, he warned, we walk down the road that leads to tyranny. Today, we aren’t walking, we’re running, practically living in a world saturated by lies.  

We are lied to about the border, we are lied to about Covid, we are lied to about the Biden family’s business dealings, we are lied to, it seems, about almost everything.

And the one thing we rely on to prevent this is the media. James Madison argued the free press was “a great bulwark of liberty,” in order to keep our government honest.  Bulwark—meaning wall of defense.

But we don’t have that anymore. The wall has been breached.  We have a media so complicit in ideological rigidity that it no longer serves us, it serves the government—the exact opposite of the reason for the First Amendment. 

Solzhenitsyn pleaded with us not to be complicit.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

America is experiencing what our Surgeon General has called an “Epidemic of Loneliness.” 

“This is a widespread social problem,” he writes, “that should have our national attention.”

He’s right, of course.

What we’re looking at, though, is something that a secular state really can’t confront on honest terms. What we’re seeing is a somewhat inevitable consequence once some massive processes of reshaping the culture is set loose.

I found it very interesting that the AP reporter on this got right to the heart of the matter. Amanda Seitz writes:

“Research shows that Americans, who have become less engaged with worship houses, community organizations and even their own family members of recent decades, have steadily reported an increase in feelings of loneliness. The number of single households has also doubled over the last 60 years.” 

What does that tell us? Well, it tells us this: Solving the loneliness problem will take effort. It will take investment in socialization, and it’s going to have to start with marriage, then children, then broader kinship structures.

We do have a loneliness problem, and we have made ourselves part of the problem.

Are we willing to do what is necessary to solve it?

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

At what point does law and order break down to the point where people feel they have no choice but to take matters into their own hands? That question has become acute in New York after the death of a mentally ill felon on the subway who routinely threatened passengers. It has become chronic in other urban centers in America as well—with progressive politicians and prosecutors refusing to charge or incarcerate those who commit crime repeatedly. 

We’ve seen this movie before—literally. In the 1970s when lax enforcement policies helped stoke record levels of crime, Death Wish and Dirty Harry attempted to provide a satirical look at the demand for law and order and public safety as warnings about fascism. Instead, the protagonists became iconic as people who imposed private justice when public institutions failed.
The social compact—where we accept the rule of law and public order while foregoing private justice—has been shredded by progressives in the last three years … with predictable results.

Expect to see more.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It sounds like a joke—except that it’s not funny.

The Navy is now using an active-duty drag queen as its “digital ambassador” in an effort to attract recruits.

But it’s hard to understand the Navy’s approach. Our new, woke armed forces don’t seem to hold much appeal for those who have traditionally served. During the last fiscal year, the Army missed its recruiting goal by 25 percent, and all three branches project recruiting shortfalls this year.

So the Navy’s decision to double down on woke signals one of two things: Either leaders are so buried in the Beltway Bubble they don’t realize how unpopular the woke agenda is with regular Americans. Or there’s an actual strategy to recruit only from one side of the political spectrum. Or: Perhaps both these things are true.

Either way, it bespeaks a massive failure of leadership. And signals a crisis in military readiness that is deeply worrisome.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Biden administration is letting the border policy of Title 42 expire this week.  Be prepared for more border chaos.  Title 42 was a temporary band-aid that staunched some of the record flow we have already been seeing.  We should expect matters to get worse.

Department of Homeland Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said last week, “I do not want to understate the severity of the challenge that we expect to encounter.”  Note his passive voice—as if he’s powerless to do anything.  For the official in charge of the border to essentially declare pre-emptive surrender should be grounds for resignation, if not impeachment. But this administration’s modus operandi has been to ignore this problem for nearly two and a half years.

A sovereign country cannot maintain itself without secure borders. We are at a crisis point. President Biden, Secretary Mayorkas and this administration need to act like it.

… and the voters need to hold our elected officials accountable.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently sent a letter to Chevron denying the company's request to exclude a request from a shareholder for a vote from other shareholders which asked the company to study the risks of giving up the production of fossil fuels. 

Green activists routinely try to cajole oil companies into trying to guess the effects of fossil fuel usage on the weather decades into the future. But one shareholder, the financial advisor David Bahnsen is asking the more relevant question. What would happen to our investment value if Chevron got out of the oil business? 

It's high time that people who are actually investing their own money get into the game which up until now has been dominated by activists. Exxon also will have a similar proposal on their ballot. It’s their chance to speak up and defend what they do every day: power the world. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Unelected federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. control too much of our lives. Part of the reason is because of the Supreme Court’s Chevron decision. Nearly 40 years ago the court ruled that courts should defer to the federal agencies’ interpretations of ambiguous laws, as long as their interpretations were reasonable. As a result, bureaucrats amassed A LOT of power.

But that may be about to change. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. And the Chevron doctrine of deference to federal agencies is at issue.

Justices including Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch have been critical of the doctrine.  And Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson has recused herself, probably because she participated in the oral argument for the case as a D.C. Circuit judge.

The case will be heard in the fall. And it looks like a welcome check on bureaucratic power may be coming.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just how politically damaging were COVID school closures? Randi Weingarten has spent the last several weeks attempting to rehabilitate herself and the American Federation of Teachers—somehow now as advocates of keeping schools open all along during the pandemic. Weingarten made that argument to Congress last month, in the media, and to anyone who would listen.

Lori Lightfoot knows better. The first Chicago mayor in 40 years to lose re-election rejected the union chief’s revisionist history and laid blame on Weingarten for the political woes of mayors across America. “We put $100 million into retrofitting classrooms,” Lightfoot told CNN, “but the union needed to work with us, and they never did that.”

Weingarten’s revisionism, along with Anthony Fauci’s disclaimer of any responsibility for shutdowns, offers tacit admissions that their panicked COVID policies failed. They know school closures and business shutdowns didn’t do anything to mitigate the pandemic and did a lot of damage to children and families. Instead of trying to gaslight America, Weingarten and the shutdown brigade should be offering apologies instead. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are very few coincidences in Washington, D.C. There’s a reason mainstream media outlets have recently broken breathless investigations into Justice Thomas, Justice Gorsuch, and Chief Justice Roberts in recent weeks.

The left is trying to delegitimize the Supreme Court — one of the few areas of American life it doesn’t control. It’s the leftist playbook. Any American institution that stands in the way of the left-wing agenda must be destroyed.

As always for the left, it’s about political power. The 2024 presidential elections are coming up. Leftist leaders realize they’ll need a reason to get their partisans to the polls. The Dobbs case (overturning Roe v. Wade) helped them stave off disaster in 2022, and so a Supreme-Court-centered campaign makes perfect sense to them.

And if it destroys the American constitutional system of separation of powers? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, to the leftist way of thinking.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Last Sunday, presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy went toe to toe with Chuck Todd on NBC’s Meet the Press.  Chuck Todd tried to take down Ramaswamy on the issues of transgenderism, especially for children and athletes.  It was a masterful performance. Ramaswamy calmly and firmly brought an argument of sanity to the NBC audience and to Chuck Todd.

Ramaswamy clearly won the debate. Here’s a clip:

Chuck Todd: “There's a lot of scientific research out there that says gender is a spectrum.”

Vivek Ramaswamy: “Chuck, I respectfully disagree. Gender dysphoria for most of our history, all the way through the DSM 5, has been characterized as a mental health disorder and I don't think it's compassionate to affirm that. I think that's cruelty.”

Ramaswamy showed and did something important conservatives should note: When you go up against the assault of the liberal-left media—especially on their territory—be firm, be confident, and most importantly: know your subject. Conservatives win when we do it right—with confidence and preparation.  Ramaswamy didn’t back down; and neither should we.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.