Townhall Review | Commentaries

Last week the so-called “conspiracy theorists” of the past three years took a victory lap.

The Energy Department concluded that the covid pandemic indeed resulted from a lab leak. Not long ago, you’d have been deplatformed for this statement.

There are other discredited Covid narratives. Lockdowns and mask mandates would stop the spread. Natural immunity was fake. Children would suffer only minimal adverse consequences from prolonged school shutdowns. Wrong. Wrong. So wrong.

It’s an unconstitutional disgrace that our government worked so hard to silence even responsible, credentialed voices countering its claims. But the real shame lies at the feet of elite media. Government would never have had a chance at all this censorship without its media lapdogs.

The role of the press in a free society is supposed to be as a check on the government — not as its enforcer. The media will pay the price in squandered trust — and it’s richly deserved.

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At age 13, she was put on puberty-blocking drugs and testosterone.

At age 15, she had a double-mastectomy, and a doctor removed her healthy breasts.

At age 17, she realized she was just a teenager and that adults who should have protected her had irreversibly damaged her instead.

Now at age 18, she’s suing Kaiser Gender Pathways Clinic, the medical center that did this to her.

Chloe Cole is her name, and you’ve never met a more courageous young woman.

Some of us have long tried to prevent this form of abuse from occurring. Over five years ago I published my book When Harry Became Sally—ringing the alarm about the unethical “medical” procedures gaining popularity.

Because the book was correct, though not politically correct, Amazon banned it from its cyber shelves.

But the tide is turning. More and more people are waking up to the outrage that is pediatric gender medicine.

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We have just passed the one-year mark of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The president went to Kyiv in an effort to demonstrate support for Ukraine and President Zelenskyy.

The headlines and toll of the war provokes some big questions, such as where in the world do we go from here?

Zelenskyy is clear, he wants his nation to made whole—regaining all the territory that the Russians have threatened or invaded and, in some cases, now occupied.

To state the matter clearly, that is not likely to happen.

Gerard Baker writing in the Wall Street Journal asks a great question: “Will the Ukraine War Push the West Toward a New Realism?” 

The alternative to realism is what's called idealism—two poles that have defined American foreign policy. 
 
Gerard Baker writes: “… privately, the president needs to convey some of that hard-headed realism he claims he's brought to more than half a century of foreign-policy debates. Ukraine has every right to defend its territory, but it doesn't have a right to American money and material to prosecute a conflict without end.”

A dose of hard-headed realism is what we need.

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Make America Florida Again? Get ready for that argument as soon as this Spring.

Presidential candidates now routinely package their election campaign kickoffs into slick video premieres. This week, a key Florida PAC offered a new twist—a campaign trailer. “Friends of DeSantis” published “The Florida Blueprint,” featuring all of the hallmarks of a campaign launch video, only without the launch.

“Friends of DeSantis” is not any ordinary PAC. They drove DeSantis’ unofficial fundraising and messaging for the last four years, raising nearly $165 million and spending almost $100 million to re-elect the governor. This new video may not include an official launch, which DeSantis appears to have put off until the end of Florida’s legislative session. It does signal that the PAC wants to fundraise in this cycle, and the only reason to do that is if DeSantis is, indeed, running.

Polls show that Republican voters see 2024 as a two-person race. With this ad, DeSantis and his supporters want the rest of those considering a 2024 bid to recognize that too—and make way.

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Nina Jankowicz and her Orwellian “Disinformation Governance Board” may have been shut down, but the Biden Administration’s ambitions to censor the internet weren’t. Apparently, the State Department has been funding a British nonprofit through a pair of American nonprofits. 

The goal is to defund and ultimately shut down websites supposedly spreading disinformation.

Not coincidentally, the targeted websites all carry information the Biden administration don’t want you to know about. They include the New York Post, which broke the Hunter Biden laptop story—ironically, dismissed as “misinformation.”

It’s remarkable that the Biden administration has spent so much energy trying to silence its critics. What’s more, it’s a clear violation of the First Amendment. In America, the government simply can’t censor private companies, even indirectly.

Spending taxpayer money to help a foreign organization pressure advertisers to defund their media critics is a new low. And it needs to stop.  Immediately.

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An old scandal from last year has ballooned into a much larger issue for the Department of Defense. In the midterm cycle, a Democrat oppo-research group obtained the military records of Republican candidate Jennifer-Ruth Green—and exposed her victimization by sexual assault while in the Air Force. 

This week, we learned that Green was not the only victim of such leaks. The Air Force acknowledged that the same group got at least eleven such files in the election. On Tuesday, two House Republicans came forward to reveal that they had been alerted to the breach. Representatives Don Bacon and Zach Nunn both want answers in this scandal, confidential information from their Air Force service leaked to Democratic operatives.

It all puts warnings about “the swamp” into a new light. It looks like employees at Defense exploited their positions to influence an election on behalf of Democrats. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin needs to answer for this—and tell us just how long this may have gone on.

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President Biden just signed an executive order launching a White House Steering Committee on Equity. It’s supposed to raise the profile of racial discrimination and other issues of equity.

This new emphasis on “equity”—equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity—is occurring along with a new rise in open, vocal animus toward straight white men.

And that’s unacceptable. Of course, individual straight white men can be jerks—just like individual members of every other group. But as a whole, more of them than any other demographic have died in wars to keep us safe. And they built a lot of the institutions that have made our country the freest and richest on earth.

As history demonstrates, only sick societies and worse leaders scapegoat groups based on their immutable characteristics. Decent people, by contrast, acknowledge that what matters is what’s inside—one’s character, work ethic and heart.

That’s a truth worth remembering.

 

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In a recent New York Times piece, guest essayist Heather Kaye writes complacently about how her children were, “co-parented by the Chinese government.” 

Ironically, Kaye praises the “moral, history and culture lessons on pulling together for the sake of the … nation”—the very elements leftists have pushed hardest to eliminate from American schools.

But what’s creepiest is her relief in ceding responsibility for her children to the Chinese state. She even considers its censorship a benefit—she doesn’t have to monitor the children’s internet use.

From Hillary Clinton’s favorite maxim—“it takes a village to raise a child”—to MSNBC commentator Melissa Harris-Perry insisting “We have to break through this idea that kids belong to their parents,” the sentiment isn’t a new one. It’s the old Marxist way: Children belong to the state.

But it’s un-American, and it’s repugnant—at least to this mom.

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2022 was a down year for markets, which is a bad sign for the economy. 

Investors, unlike pundits and politicians, have skin in the game. If they are wrong, they suffer real economic consequences.

So markets are better forecasters than economic experts – yes, better than people like me. 

When risk-sensitive investments are down much more than safer ones, that's a serious recession signal. 

The S&P is down roughly 20%. Stocks are down more than bonds. Risky bonds are down more than safe ones. Large tech companies are down about twice as much as the S&P. Consumer discretionary companies (vacations, jewelry, eating out) are down much more than consumer staples (groceries, cleaning supplies, toothpaste). 

Investors are betting on necessities. 

When the best performers of the year are recession hedges, inflation hedges and tax shelters, it says a lot about where things are headed.

For America, it's not good.

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We hear a lot about the science deniers today….
 
But: Who are the real science deniers?
 
Well, unfortunately, in 21st-century post-Roe America, there are people who deny the basic scientific reality that the entity in the womb is an unborn human being.
 
There are also equality deniers, people who deny that all human beings are created equal and endowed by their Creator with an unalienable right to life.
 
But the message from science is clear and unequivocal:
 
The fetus in the womb is a human baby. 
 
And philosophically, morally, that human being should be treated equal because that unborn human being is our equal.
 
It seems obvious, yet abortion advocates contort logic and their own conscience to deny the evidence.
 
It’s not an overreach of government to protect the natural right to life of every human being, born and unborn.
 
The science tells us this. Our own minds and hearts tell us this.
 
To believe otherwise is to deny science and our own humanity.

I’m Ryan Anderson.

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