Townhall Review | Commentaries

The Biden administration is seeking 87,000 more IRS agents to make sure every last tax dollar is collected from the wallets of hard-working Americans.

But if they’re that desperate, they should be more careful about the way they hand it out. Apparently, the feds have lost at least $276 billion dollars that was designated as covid-19 relief funding, according to the combined estimates provided by inspectors general of the Treasury and Labor Departments, along with the Small Business Administration.

The Labor Department’s Inspector General estimated that $76 billion dollars set aside for unemployment insurance was lost through fraud. And at least $86 billion dollars was misappropriated via fraud and waste at the SBA, according to its inspector general. Both said those figures were likely to rise.

Leona Helmsley once famously said that paying taxes was only for the little people. But nowadays, actually being held accountable for taxpayer money is obviously the rarity.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Even the Biden administration understands how unpopular radical transgender policies are. That’s why they’re trying to have it both ways with biological men in women’s sports.

First, the Department of Education released new guidelines nullifying the bans 20 states have passed on men competing in women’s sports. But simultaneously, they’re allowing schools receiving federal funds to stop transgender athletes from playing in leagues that don’t conform to their biological sex — under certain strict criteria.  

The result is an incoherent mish-mash, but the takeaway is clear as day. President Biden wants to be able to claim he’s protected female athletes. At the same time, he wants to pacify the loud and aggressive transgender lobby — and keep states from championing all-female sports in any meaningful way.

The device is too clever by half. America’s women see through it … and we’re not impressed.

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 the 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.

Harvard is defending its admission policies in the Supreme Court this year; policies that discriminate against Asian students. Diversity, they argue, “lead[s] to greater knowledge”…and promotes “tolerance.”

None of this is true if you are of the wrong race or the wrong political viewpoint.  At Stanford Law School, students shut and shouted down a federal judge because they didn’t agree with his legal position on a prisoner’s transgender rights.  At San Francisco State last week, students put swimmer Riley Gaines in fear of her life, after she was assaulted and barricaded into a room for three hours for talking about biological differences in sports.

Gaines said the inmates have taken over the asylum.  She’s right. The notion of diversity has proven itself to be nothing more than code for its opposite: enforced consent—and the prevention of common sense and true equality.  If we don’t reverse this, the new word for “college campus” should be “asylum.”

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We’ve heard a lot about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi’s Catholic faith. So where were they last week? During the holiest time in the Christian year, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center (America’s largest military hospital) ordered Catholic priests to halt religious services on its grounds—right before Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter.

A community of Franciscan priests who have served soldiers at the center for almost 20 years were terminated, with their contract awarded instead to a secular firm. Cost differences between the two are reportedly de minimis.

The bigger problem, however, is that the secular contractor cannot provide the requisite pastoral care for the sick and elderly at Walter Reed. And patients can’t readily access pastoral care outside hospital grounds.

What a despicable violation of the First Amendment rights of those who have offered their all in service to our country.  It needs to be remedied. Now.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So: How do you get on the Supreme Court in Wisconsin? Evidently, you break all the rules, declare your position on issues that will come before the court, and run with lots of liberal outside funding. That’s how Milwaukee Judge Janet Protasiewicz won her runoff race on April 4. 

The race will go down as the most expensive judicial race in American history, at least so far. Judge Protasiewicz ran to the left, breaking convention (and setting up likely challenges to her role in future cases) by declaring her “values” such as a right to abortion. That issue is sure to come before the court in short order, as will the establishment of congressional districts in Wisconsin. 

Americans easily forget how important the courts are, and this is a wake-up call for conservatives. If we keep losing elections like this one, we will see the Left take over the courts, seat by seat. Did we work so hard for 50 years only to surrender now? 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For years, Twitter pushed back on complaints—primarily from the right—about suspected “shadow-banning.” Executives, including founder Jack Dorsey, repeatedly insisted in congressional testimony that no such practice took place. 

Now: Elon Musk has released Twitter’s algorithm and we know the truth. Twitter built its code to suppress comments based on complaints, blocks, and mutes, punishing users far more for such feedback than for ‘likes’ and engagement. 

Twitter engineered its algorithm to incentivize block lists and complaint campaigns, both of which got widely adopted on the Left. It would not take many blocks, mutes and especially complaints about inappropriate comments to get users locked out of any distribution and their input quashed on the broader platform. 

And all the while, Twitter executives gaslit conservatives about their shadow-banning.

Thanks to Musk for getting the truth out.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We tend to think of the resurrection of Jesus as only a religious event, with no political implications.

But Jesus was executed by the state as an enemy of the state. The debates about resurrection in first century Judaism were intensely political. The Sadducees, defenders of the status quo, denied the resurrection. The more orthodox Pharisees affirmed it.

This makes sense.

Bible scholar N.T. Wright points out that states derive their power ultimately from their ability to kill people. By rising from the dead, Jesus conquered death, disarming that power. Christ’s resurrection was inherently—in the best sense of the word—revolutionary.

His victory gives men and women the courage to resists the Caesars, and the Kaisers and Czars of this world. The cross, the sword, the guillotine, the gulag and the firing squad do not represent the end.

The spirit of Caesar is still around, but more importantly so is the Spirit of Christ.

He is risen.  He is risen, indeed.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s a sobering moment for America. A former American president sat in a Manhattan courtroom, being arraigned on criminal charges and facing a likely trial. Is this just a new and sad chapter in American politics? Well, it certainly is political. The New York DA who went to the grand jury seeking an indictment against former President Trump had been elected on a promise to indict Donald Trump. Returning to Mar-a-Lago after the court appearance, Trump returned fire. This prosecution is political, but it looms large for other reasons as well.

Donald Trump attempted to pay off a porn star. That’s quite sufficient as a national embarrassment, but sex scandals are not exactly new. What is new is the use of criminal prosecutions against political enemies, and Donald Trump certainly has plenty of them. But once this precedent is set, he will surely not be the last. 

Any way you look at it, it was a day that will live in national embarrassment. Pray for our nation. America needs our prayers, from sea to shining sea.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Vladimir Putin’s government has arrested a major Western reporter, in this case a reporter for The Wall Street Journal—Evan Gershkovich—who was taken into custody on Thursday of last week.

Now of course Gershkovich was accused of being a spy—that’s as old as the old Soviet playbook.

Those who have a memory of the Cold War know that that’s exactly what took place routinely during the years of the Soviet Union under the context of Soviet Communism. You had Western journalists repeatedly arrested. They were held on charges of espionage and spying, but no one on either side really believed it was espionage at all—it’s a power play.

Instead—and we knew this at the time: These reporters were pawns in a massive great power game between the United States and the Soviet Union.

But it’s not a fair or equal situation. In the United States, you have freedom of the press. In Russia—in the old Soviet Union—not at all.

We’re seeing a parallel dynamic emerge today.

There are a lot of moral questions and there’s no easy way out of this.

It’s almost as if we are back in the Cold War once again.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.