Townhall Review | Commentaries

“Anti-Catholic bigotry appears to be festering in the FBI, and the Bureau is treating Catholics as potential terrorists because of their beliefs.” This startling charge was leveled by 20 state attorneys general in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, after a memo from the FBI’s Richmond field office came to light.

The memo was withdrawn amid a storm of criticism, but it warned of extremists being drawn into “radical-traditionalist” Roman Catholic organizations known primarily for their love of the Latin Mass.

This is an urgent opportunity for Wray to address the growing distrust of the FBI. He must know blanket denials of partisan behavior by the bureau’s staff won’t convince much of the country. 

Quality control has obviously slipped, and Wray must firmly and forcefully bring hammers down on those ideological outliers and political partisans operating inside the bureau. 

They may not be many, but they're doing immense damage. 

Congress should give Wray the power to do just that.

The erosion of trust in the FBI is at a crisis level—and Director Wray must do more than express regret.

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Four unidentified flying objects have been shot down over America … since last Friday. But it took until Monday afternoon for The White House to start telling Americans what was going on.

Canadians heard from their defense minister on Saturday. Here, no one but press flaks have been made available to reporters. Even congressmen and governors have complained about being left in the dark.

People were left to wonder if there had been further Chinese encroachments or whether we were finally experiencing the alien incursion of science fiction lore.

Finally, on Monday afternoon, the White House ruled out alien invasion but shared scant more information.

So, yet again: the Biden White House fails to inspire confidence. Worse, its silence registers a lack of care and outright contempt for the American people. We’re not entitled to state secrets, but we do have a right to know what is flying over our country—and why.

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The social panic over “disinformation” reached a new low last week. An exposé in the Washington Examiner revealed that Microsoft had blocked advertisers from sponsoring hundreds of conservative websites, based on secret blacklists created by a company calling itself the Global Disinformation Index. Without any data—and indeed without any attempt at engagement—GDI smeared hundreds of conservative sites and writers and attempted to put them out of business.

Included in those blacklists were most of Salem Media’s sites—Townhall was rated “reprehensible/offensive,” while others—such as Hot Air—got tagged as “false/misleading” without any evidence. Most hilariously, GDI’s public report hailed Buzzfeed as one of the most reliable sources even after its publication of outright disinformation in the Steele dossier, while rating the libertarian Reason Magazine’s site as one of the highest risks for disinformation.

Microsoft has retreated rapidly from GDI after this exposé, but not before the McCarthyist tactic got exposed for what it is—an attempt to deplatform conservatives and punish dissent.

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The new employment report showed a gain of roughly half a million jobs in January, and immediately “Biden boom” started trending on Twitter. 

Not so fast. Yes, that’s a lot of jobs added in one month, but one month does not make a boom. For most of the past year job growth has been weak, and the economy faltering. Real wages fell and people's saving fell along with them. Credit card debt mounted up. People who were out of the workforce saw their savings and credit depleted, read headlines about layoffs and got worried enough to go back to work. 

Usually new jobs are a sign of a growing economy, but the growth data points to a stagnant economy right now. It's good that people are going back to work, but there's a difference between job growth from an actual boom and hard times driving people back to work. 

This is no boom.

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“Why can’t they just go to another baker?” That’s the question many are asking after the most recent setback for Jack Phillips.
 
Several years ago Jack won 7 to 2 at the Supreme Court in a case involving his decision to not create custom wedding cakes celebrating same-sex relationships.
 
Now he’s lost at the Colorado Court of Appeals over a different cake: a happy “gender transition” cake, with pink batter and blue frosting—meant to symbolize and celebrate someone who claims to be a woman on the inside but a man on the outside.
 
But the Colorado Court ruled against Jack, “We conclude that creating a pink cake with blue frosting is not inherently expressive.” Baloney.
 
The activist who asked for this particular cake went to Jack on purpose and told him what the cake was meant to express.
 
That’s why the activists won’t go to another baker. They want Jack to bend the knee. At some point the Supreme Court will need to put a stop to this.

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Even if you are like the vast majority of Americans who did not watch the recent Grammy Awards, you probably do know that a non-binary man and a transexual presented a song titled "Unholy" in a performance resembling a Satanic ritual, and then up popped the logo for Pfizer! 

The spiritual and cultural rot of this is obvious to see. But from a more mundane business point of view, this has to be one of the worst branding decisions in the history of branding. 

Big Pharma has had a bad couple of years in the eyes of many Americans. Pfizer in particular has gotten in hot water with various undercover video released by Project Veritas. Now Pfizer's brand is associated with Satanic trolling. Who made this decision? 

It's long past time for major American companies to stop taking the goodwill of middle-America for granted, to stop pandering to the sexual identity of the month club, and stop trampling on Christian sensibilities. 

Do you have Pfizer stock in your retirement account? If you do; you're the boss. 

It's time to speak up. 

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Joe Biden had big ambitions. His State of the Union was designed to persuade dubious voters—only 37 percent of Democrats want him to run again!—that he deserves a second term.

But the American people aren’t stupid. A recent Washington Post poll found 60 percent of Americans believe Biden hasn’t made progress in creating good jobs. They remember when he took office, inflation was lower, gas was cheaper, streets were safer, and our border secure.

Sadly for him, Biden ultimately was Biden. He boasted, he shouted, he misled, he took the cheap shots—preaching unity while accusing opponents of secret plans to cut social security and Medicare, and threaten democracy. Calling for a ban on resort fees while barely mentioning the border crisis and China’s global ambitions.

Biden’s refrain was “Let’s finish the job!” Given his track record, it’s not clear Americans will take him up on the offer.

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Hunter Biden went on offense last week over his laptop and investigations of tax fraud, allegations of sexual abuse of employees, and potential corruption. Unfortunately for Biden, he and his team fumbled—and raising even more questions about political manipulation and weaponized law enforcement.

Biden’s attorney sent out letters to state and federal law enforcement demanding investigations into the theft of Hunter’s laptop and data. Not only did that come more than two years after the exposure of the laptop, but also served as a belated admission that the laptop and the data was Hunter’s. Later in the day, Hunter’s team attempted to walk back the admission—to much derision.

Even more damaging, this effort comes as House Republicans will open separate probes into Hunter Biden’s connections to foreign money as well as the political weaponization of the Department of Justice and the IRS. Biden’s attorney demanded prosecution from both in this matter, validating the GOP’s concerns.

This intimidation effort is a mark of desperation from the Bidens as their scandals deepen.

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The markets appear to be pricing in a recession in America.

In fact, recent data suggest that we may have already entered it. But this recession was avoidable. It was, in baseball parlance, “an unforced error.” You see, a distorted economic theory called Keynesianism teaches that inflation is caused by too much growth and so the solution to inflation is … recession! It might be an official recession, half a year of negative growth or it could be what's called a growth recession in which growth remains positive but sluggishly low. 

The problem is that when inflation gets very high, government thinks its needs to hit the economic brakes hard, and that usually leads to a bona fide recession. Supply side economics is the right answer. It sees growth as the solution, not the problem. Tax and regulatory easing to help with growth and monetary tightening to help with inflation. Forcing a recession to fight inflation is all pain and no gain. It’s time to bring back Reaganomics. 

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The Columbia Journalism Review issued a lengthy and devastating condemnation of mainstream media last week, deconstructing all of the ways in which news outlets failed in the Russia-collusion hoax. It started with the Steele Dossier, a document that Bob Woodward prophetically called “a garbage document” at the time, but establishment media embraced for two years or more.

Only after the futility of Robert Mueller’s probe did these outlets admit their error—and not universally. The New York Times refuses to this day to account for its failures, insisting that they got it right all along.

At the same time this review came out, the media elite participated in a Cronkite Media Lab symposium to declare that “objectivity has to go.” Instead, the media pledged to serve their own “identity, life experiences, and cultural contexts.”

In other words, the media plans to double down on its corrupt approach to reporting news. The CJR report notes that media credibility is at an all-time low. Expect it to get even lower with current leadership.

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