Townhall Review | Commentaries

The White House claims that Joe Biden’s proposed student-loan debt forgiveness plan will rescue tens of millions from an unjust burden. It’s really just a shameful and illegal abuse of executive power by Biden—spending hundreds of billions without congressional authorization. It does nothing except to bail out academia—and the ideological factory it has become.

The demands for such debt relief prove that the financial model for college has failed. Tuition has risen so high that the extra earnings from a college education no longer covers its costs. When “thousands” of Laurence Tribe’s Harvard—Harvard!—graduates are trapped by their student debt, it proves a total market failure. 

The only beneficiaries of this failed market model are the universities deluged in consumer demand fueled by government-protected loans bankrupting students. And that directly benefits the progressive politicians that get support from the progressive ideologues produced by academia. 

And now it’s the working and middle classes that will foot the bill. It’s massive consumer fraud—and we’ll all be paying for it. 

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Pete Buttigieg—our Secretary of Transportation—recently pointed middle class families towards electric cars as the way out of the problem of high gas costs. For a Transportation Secretary, he sure isn't very good at giving directions. Electricity prices are up 95 percent since Biden took office, and in the last month, while gas prices fell, electricity prices kept rising. And of course, that’s nothing compared to what would happen if Americans actually did switch en masse to electric vehicles. 
 
But there's a deeper problem with electric cars, the horrific abuses in the supply chain. The National Legal and Policy Center put a proposal on the ballot asking GM to examine the use of slave and child labor in the production of batteries for their electric cars and to examine the risk of cancer for children in the mining of cobalt. 

Amazingly, the standard activists suddenly became curiously incurious about whether electric cars were built on the backs of childhood cancer and slave-like working conditions.

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“First, do no harm” is a sacred principle as old as medical practice itself. But as Dr. Anthony Fauci announces his retirement, it’s obvious that’s a standard he failed to meet.

In the wake of his handling of the covid pandemic, he leaves a trail of ruined lives. He failed to balance other needs against the national interest in battling the virus, crushing countless businesses. Americans were isolated for a protracted period, creating a profound mental health crisis. Children lost more precious years of their lives and milestone experiences they can never recover.

Fauci’s conduct leave serious, unanswered questions about his role in gain of function research that may have created the virus. His lies about vaccine efficacy enabled flawed, legally suspect mandates.

Worst of all, his posing, preening, and politicizing leave a divided country, deeply suspicious of public health authorities—for good reason.

Goodbye, Tony Fauci. And good riddance.      

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We are living in a vortex of moral change. 

The Dobbs Decision handed down at the end of June by the Supreme Court was a game changer. It shifted the issue of abortion from the national level to a battle in every one of the 50 states. 

The midterm elections are now coming quickly and in a post-Dobbs world, Democrats are running hard on the issue of abortion. They clearly believe it's going to be a winning issue for them.

I think these days will be long remembered as some of the most strategic days in our nation's history, perhaps even in the history of Western civilization, particularly related to the big moral issues.

It's a sad commentary that there's so much focus right now on which side of the abortion argument might be the winning political argument. 

As we know, the most important question isn't what is politically expedient, but what is right? 

This is a time for deep, moral, and worldview seriousness, and it's also a time to at least hope and pray that the American voter will see the dignity of innocent, unborn, human life and live and vote accordingly. 

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This fall's elections are going to be fought on six very big issues: The three A's and the three E's. 

Affordability, and you know that means inflation, the cost of groceries and gas. 

Anxiety, are you worried about crime in your neighborhood? Are you worried about the border? 

Anger over the indifference of elites, especially elite media, legacy media, ignoring those ordinary Americans who have made these campaign issues central, but which are not covered in the legacy media. 

The three E's are of course:

Energy—that gas price.

ESG—the left is trying to take over corporate America and make them do an activist agenda at the expense of your retirement portfolios.

And then finally and most importantly of all, Education—the out of control education establishment, teachers unions and school administrators and superintendents who mask kids and close schools and have cost them an entire year. 

The three A's and the three E's are going to define this year's election, and I encourage you, keep them in mind as you make your choices. 

Salem Media certainly hopes you will. 

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Anthony Fauci has announced his departure from his role with the NIH and—most importantly—as Joe Biden's "chief medical advisor." By December, Fauci will depart these positions after 38 years in government. It's welcome news.

Fauci serves more as a cautionary tale on the pandemic embrace of "scientific leaders" dictating public policy. While hardly alone in erring repeatedly, Fauci made himself the public face of a scientific technocracy that pushed top-down diktats and devastating lockdowns and access restrictions, almost none of which measurably improved public health.

As Biden's advisor, he pushed unconstitutional mandates with little or no scientific foundation—leading the pushback against those who dared to question these eventually discredited policies.

The past two years have provided us an object lesson on the failure of "expert rule," and why public policy should come from elected officials accountable to citizens. Let us remember Fauci by ensuring we never produce his like in governance again.

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Politics is first and foremost a war of words. Changing the definitions of words is a way to change the way people think without actually having to offer persuasive evidence. 

Take the definitional war over the word “recession.” The dictionary definition of a recession is two quarters—six months—of negative economic growth. That's also the definition found in Wikipedia since 2011.

Furthermore, the law defines it that way. For example, the Graham-Rudman-Hollings deficit reduction bill made an exception to deficit limits in the case of recession and used the standard definition, two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Futures markets use it.

Whether that is the best definition or not, is not the point. The point is that we can’t suddenly redefine words when their meanings become inconvenient to our ruling class. The way to resist top-down language control is to not participate in it. A recession is six months of contraction—and, yes: we are in one. 

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We just got the new inflation numbers and the Biden administration and enablers in the media claimed that inflation had dropped to zero. 

But it takes a lot of fuzzy math to get to that number. In reality, the new numbers showed that inflation for the last year was 8 1/2 percent. So, how do they get to zero? They look at only one month change. So, for a year prices went up 9 percent, then—for only one month—they didn't go up. 

That's how you turn 8 1/2 percent inflation into good news … or at least try to. 

We need to look at long-term trends, and the long term trends are bad. In the twenty months since Biden took office, consumer prices are up 13 percent. Every one of those twenty months prices went up, except this past one. 

It is hardly grounds for a victory lap.

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This week we mark a sad milestone for America—precisely a year since our calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan.

There are innumerable ways to count the cost. Thirteen U.S. service members died. More than 800 Americans remain behind, stranded in a hostile country, along with the Afghans who risked everything to help us there.

The Taliban celebrated the anniversary of America’s retreat with a parade, complete with elements of the seven-billion-dollars-worth of military equipment we left.

One group definitely not celebrating is the country’s women, once again stripped of their dignity. They can no longer go out alone after dark or attend high school and must veil from head to toe.

Joe Biden’s administration deserted Afghanistan without a plan. And there’s no accountability for anyone for any of it. Is it any wonder Americans dislike and distrust so many of their once-trusted institutions?

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The Department of Justice’s unprecedented raid on Donald Trump’s residence at Mar a Lago has set off a cascade of rancor. Those on the right point out the differing standards of enforcement—pointing to Hillary Clinton in 2016. The left responds by insisting that no one is above the law.

As the arguments grow more heated, wise heads should prevail on ensuring that they do not do further damage to the body politic. Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray publicly complained that threatening messages aimed at the FBI have increased significantly—including an attack on an FBI office in Cincinnati that left the attacker dead. 

The actions of a few on the fringe should not deter Americans from demanding accountability from our government for their actions. At the same time, citizens should remain focused on the substantive issues present in this controversy.

Americans should pray for wisdom, patience, perseverance and truth to overcome anger. 

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