Townhall Review | Commentaries

November’s elections revealed that we remain a 50-50 country—and the grinding of red and blue plates beneath the surface of American politics continues to increase.

It was essentially a status quo election: Republicans did well in places like Florida and Iowa and New York, but Democratic incumbents did better than the historic norm.

America’s self-sorting into blue and red enclaves is far from complete—as citizens flee tax burdens and heavy-handed blue state governance.

The GOP’s march to the House majority over the past two election cycles should buttress not just House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s claim on the speaker’s gavel but also GOP chair Ronna McDaniel’s bid for another term. 

House Republicans must move quickly next month to confirm McCarthy as the speaker and to stand up a new select committee on China.

Infighting will waste time and momentum. 

Our nation faces external threats that are serious. Our domestic challenges are real.

Americans elected a GOP majority in the House.

It’s time for them to get on with the job.

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Elon Musk recently released information to Matt Taibbi about Twitter’s censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop and government collusion. Taibbi’s no conservative. A New York Times article described him as “once a major voice of the political left.”

Even so, the mainstream media immediately denounced Taibbi for reporting what was clearly news. Even more shocking—and very revealing—they all used virtually identical language to do it, accusing Taibbi of engaging in “PR for the richest man on earth.”

The episode highlights the fact that “mainstream media” no longer reports news. Instead, they root for uniformly left-wing policies, which makes them Democrat propagandists.

Our elite media outlets no longer serve the function of a free press in a representative democracy: to serve as a watchdog investigating and reporting on government wrongdoing.

Free societies need an informed electorate. Elite media’s abdication of responsibility is an ominous development for all of us.

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Two billionaires dominated the news this week. One had spent $44 billion of his own money to purchase Twitter and provide more transparency and freedom of public speech.

The other took in billions of dollars from others, allowed it to move back and forth between two of his companies, and made it disappear.

Guess which billionaire got vilified by the mainstream media?

Elon Musk—Twitter’s new owner. They accuse him of attacking and undermining democracy by using the First Amendment as a moderation value on social media.

Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX has been given ample opportunity to rationalize away the destruction of investors’ wealth. He’s been a darling of the Left for his “altruistic capitalism” campaign and—not coincidentally—he was also the second biggest Democrat donor this cycle. 

The contrast exposed mainstream media’s corrupt value system: Excusing fraud while demonizing free speech and transparency. Fortunately, Americans have a far wiser moral compass.

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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Monday in a vitally important free speech case.
 
At issue is whether the state of Colorado can force a website designer to make custom websites for same-sex weddings.
 
The designer is a Christian, and so properly believes that marriage can only be between a husband and wife, and thus a same-sex relationship is something other than marriage. To use her God-given gifts and talents as a designer to celebrate something that doesn’t accord with God’s design for marriage violates her conscience.
 
But the state of Colorado says she must either make websites celebrating same-sex weddings, or make no wedding websites at all.
 
That’s compelled speech, and it’s unconstitutional. Hopefully the Supreme Court will do the right thing and rule—very clearly—that no state may force anyone to speak a message against their beliefs.

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Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke was recently given the Nobel prize for economics largely because of his policies during the Great Recession: bank bailouts, interest rate suppression and quantitative easing. 

The timing could not be worse.

The nation is currently going through the painful withdrawal pains of tapering off Dr. Bernanke’s feel-good medicine. Make no mistake: Bernanke’s term as Fed Chairman was an abject failure. 

He continued rate hikes in 2006, helping to trigger a deflationary recession which he was slow to see and respond to. Bernanke vastly increased money supply and yet arrogantly claimed to “60 Minutes” he was 100 percent certain that the excess money could be withdrawn in order to avoid inflation. 

The agony we’re going through today started with the false solutions of the Bernanke era.

Bernanke deserves blame—not a Nobel prize. 

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The Biden administration has authorized Chevron to expand oil pumping … in Venezuela.

You heard that right. Rather than creating jobs here in the United States – where there are the largest known recoverable oil reserves in the world – Biden officials are enriching the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro.

There’s no environmental justification for the decision. Venezuela’s oil is heavier and dirtier than ours.  

The Biden administration claims it’s rewarding Maduro for resuming talks with the opposition party. But Maduro’s government has engaged in crimes against humanity, according to a U.N. appointed panel. Since 2014, there have been unlawful executions, enforced disappearances, torture, and arbitrary detentions—especially against government protestors.

Recently, Maduro stated that he might move the 2024 elections forward to next year. Is Biden actually giving this socialist strongman a political boost?
It’s time for American media to ask some probing questions about Chevron’s new Venezuelan drilling permit.

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The U.S. Senate just passed a bill called the “Respect for Marriage Act.”  

Now don’t be fooled by the Orwellian language. This bill will go further than the Supreme Court did in its Obergefell decision of 2015.

There are a host of reasons to be concerned about this bill. Right now, I will highlight just one. Religious liberty.

Rights of religious freedom are absolutely threatened under the current form of this bill … and not by accident. Consider the statement Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee offered on Twitter. He said: “I offered to support the bill if the sponsors would include my amendment to prohibit the government from removing tax-exempt status based on religious beliefs about same-sex marriage …  The sponsors adamantly refused even to consider that.”  He then asked the question, “Why?”

The answer is simple: It is because your colleagues do not, did not, will not offer these protections, and that's the point.

The Senate should have rejected the “Respect for Marriage Act.”

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Be glad if you didn’t see it. Luxury fashion house Balenciaga won the race to the bottom with its recent ad campaign. It featured children posing with bondage-styled bears and included a page with a Supreme Court ruling on child pornography.

Fashion advertising strives to be “hip” and “edgy” and “transgressive.” But what Balenciaga did is way too far. It isn’t bold—it’s deviant. It’s a concerted effort to destigmatize the sexualization of children. That’s evil and it’s wrong.

The good news is that Balenciaga has gotten a lot of blowback for what they did. And that’s key. Because the only way radicals will stop pushing the envelope is if the rest of us say to them: Enough. Hands off the children.

It’s every adult’s job to protect the young and vulnerable from predators—even if they’re trendy fashionistas at Balenciaga, to their eternal shame.

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Recent market volatility has led some to claim that markets themselves are inherently unstable. But the data do not back them up. 

The up and down of “risk on” and then “risk off” sentiment is associated with the instability created by our own central bank—the Fed—which has grown into a financial colossus starting with its reaction to the Great Recession. It’s now the single largest player in our financial markets. 

That's a problem in and of itself, but the other problem is that the Fed has an inherently unstable “dual mandate” from Congress. 

It has the job of fighting inflation by selling investments to drive down prices and also the job of fighting unemployment by buying investments to stimulate consumer sentiment. 

Every day, investors are forced to comb through the news and figure out which of the two contradicting mandates the Fed will follow next.

The Fed should stick to its original mandate, sound money, or be replaced with something that will.

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The origin of Thanksgiving goes back to the Plymouth plantation, founded by the Pilgrims in 1620. You may have learned that in school, but I bet you didn’t learn this in school: the original Thanksgiving came after the settlement abandoned socialism in favor of capitalism.

It appears that the original charter adopted a form of communal ownership and required equality of income. You’re probably not surprised that this led to starvation and, as a consequence, plague. After two years, the colonists did something which few socialists since have done—they learned from their mistake, and instituted private ownership. The starving times ended, the colonists traded their surpluses with the Natives and the new abundance was celebrated with a day of Thanksgiving.

It’s not just about food, it’s about freedom. Socialism is en vogue again today, but maybe this time around we can learn from history before we repeat its errors.

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