Townhall Review | Conservative Commentary On Today's News

.America is celebrating its 250th birthday, but it's been hard to get the party started.

Many Americans remember our bicentennial in 1976. It wasn't long after Watergate and the Vietnam War. It was even a presidential election year, but we put all of that on hold to celebrate our great nation.

How long ago that seems. This year, the administration launched a nonpartisan freedom 250 initiative to give America a spectacular birthday party. But left-wing activist targeted artists scheduled to perform at the national concert, leading some to withdraw and turning what should have been a patriotic event into a political fight.

Instead of bringing Americans together, the celebration has become another arena for political conflict. That's unfortunate and revealing. It shows how much work remains to restore unity in our country, pride in our history and confidence in our future.

California’s progressives are eyeing other people’s money. Again. The proposed “Billionaire Tax Act” would amend the state constitution to impose a one-time five percent tax on residents with a net worth above a billion dollars.

Supporters say it’s just a one-time levy for worthy causes. But experience says “one time” rarely means one time, and the unintended consequences are real.

The measure has yet to go before voters, but the threat alone has already pushed almost forty percent of California’s billionaire wealth out of the state. Gone. Along with it: income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and the charitable giving those individuals once supported.

Wealth is mobile. It goes where it’s treated well. And it’s not hard to see why.

California should remember that before it drives even more of its tax base away.

We warned repeatedly when Canada began to adopt assisted suicide as part of its government-run health care. Socialized medicine combined with assisted suicide sets up foreseeable economic incentives that reward disposal of patients rather than chronic care.

But even we couldn’t have dreamed that Canada would grow so desperate to reduce costs that they would condone assisted suicide assessments in fast-food parking lots.

Yet that’s exactly what happened in Ontario, where a doctor diagnosed a chronic bowel problem and emotional issues outside a Tim Horton’s coffee shop—and took the ‘patient’ to be euthanized.

Why? The doctor provides their system what it needs: fewer patients. That’s the real standard of care when single-payer systems face the choice of chronic care or pushing patients to end their lives.

This is what they call humane treatment in Canada.

If progressives have their way here, the US will be next. 

With the end of commencement season, it is worth considering what advice a generation of youth more in need of sober and serious advice than at any other time in our history should hear.

Professor Jonathan Haidt has pointed out, having given our children smartphones, we are now engaged in the largest uncontrolled experiment humanity has ever performed on its own children.  Major corporations now spend billions of dollars. Their primary mission? Getting as many children as glued to screens for as long as possible.  Humanity is being stolen from our youth. At great costs and great prices.

Former Senator and university president Ben Sasse, diagnosed with cancer, expected to die this year, is giving every audience he can his final lessons about life. 

It is as beautiful as it is selfless. 

Watch his 60 Minutes interview. 

Everything we need to know about life, and how to live meaningfully, is there. His main concern? “These super devices in our pockets that have distracted us from some of the most fundamental human activities and aspirations of life.”

It’s commencement season again—another class of young Americans heading out into the world. But one statistic says a lot about what they’re leaving behind: at top universities this year, left-wing speakers outnumber others six to one on commencement stages.

That lack of viewpoint diversity point to something deeper: An intellectual climate marked by intolerance and conformity, not curiosity and debate.

There was a time when a college degree signaled that a student had learned how to think—and had encountered the ideas that shaped the Western tradition. Today, that’s no longer a safe assumption.

Too often, higher education has become dominated by a narrow ideological framework, with too few faculty willing—or able—to model real intellectual rigor.

The result is predictable: universities that once fostered inquiry now too often enforce orthodoxy.

That’s not education. It’s indoctrination.

As we watch the president navigate the ongoing interactions with the remaining leadership in Iran, it’s worth reminding ourselves: President Trump has done hundreds of deals. He also walked away from probably three times as many deals.

The thousands of commentators with little to zero knowledge of negotiations are just guessing.

Here’s what we know:

First: President Trump has the crucial experience, and:

Second: the D Team in Iran doesn’t.

No president in 47 years has dealt Iran blows like this. President Trump isn’t going to trade massive leverage for the approval of states that aren’t our allies.

President Trump is very good at the close. He's not going to get taken. He's walked away from a lot of tables. If it's a bad deal or the Iranians do the bait and switch deal, he will walk away again and I hope combat would resume. But right now, we just don't know.

I just don't think the president is going to get fooled.

In 1976, Harry Jaffa wrote that in 1776 the United States was nothing, promising to become everything; and having become everything it was promising to become nothing.  This is truer now, on our 250th anniversary, than 50 years ago.

The state of our students’ civic understanding is abominable: we are at a record low of students knowing the basic fundaments of our constitutional and political formation and makeup.  This directly results from a deliberate mis-educating of our youth: an education system that teaches that America is a blight rather than a blessing on and to the world and its citizens. Who would want to study, much less venerate, that kind of country?

C.S. Lewis wrote; to miseducate a child is to leave him more susceptible to propaganda as an adult. Thus, I give you our disaffected young adults: alienated from America and her successes; young adults susceptible to carnival barking podcasters promoting a down-market view of patriotism and America.  What a shame at such a time as this.  We must take back our schools.

This Memorial Day comes as our nation marks 250 years of freedom—a quarter of a millennia since the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

On this Memorial Day, we should pause and recognize that we don’t have one without the other. That is: We only have the freedom that we cherish as a result of those who stood up to fight for it and defend it. And more specifically: Willing to pay the ultimate price.

From the Revolutionary War and the nation’s founding to those who have paid the price in recent days and months as President Trump and his administration work to ensure that the mullahs of Iran never have a nuclear weapon: We remain free today because of the men and women who have committed themselves to our nation’s defense.

Over 1.3 million have paid the ultimate price.

Today: We say “thank you.”

It’s also a day for us to dedicate ourselves to what—in 1863—Abraham Lincoln called “the unfinished work” before us.

On behalf of Salem Media, Happy Memorial Day.

Justice Clarence Thomas recently became the second longest-serving justice in US history — and that’s something to celebrate. He is exceptional, both as a jurist and as a man.

Raised in poverty in a wooden shack in the segregated South, he credits his grandfather for shaping his character. From that foundation, he has articulated a powerful and increasingly influential originalist vision of the Constitution, grounded in the natural law principles of our Declaration of Independence.

His character is remarkable. Justice Thomas is beloved by those who know him. He’s renowned for his kindness: treating his clerks like family, knowing the names of court staff, and helping others with no expectation of return.

Justice Thomas is quite simply a national treasure. He’s a blessing to America. And it’s right that we celebrate this outstanding jurist and extraordinary man.

Is the war with Iran “worth it?”

The cost—at this point—is the loss of 13 American soldiers and scores more seriously wounded. If, as widely expected, combat operations resume those human costs will climb.

So too will gas prices and the prices of everything that depends upon oil.

President Trump knows this, of course, but stated plainly: Operation Epic Fury had to be undertaken.

The reason is quite simple. Iran intends to obtain nuclear weapons by any means possible. Their rulers are “crazy.”

Does not the rise in gas prices destroy at least the argument that the civilians bear no costs of war at least when it comes to this, the Iran War?

You may not like paying the sacrifice. But the cost of war is at least being felt beyond the military.

Iran simply cannot have a nuclear weapon.

This is an argument the country should and will have. It is one that is long overdue.

Numerous media outlets had a difficult time with the Rededicate 250 celebration the White House sponsored this past Sunday.  One major paper reported “Until Trump’s second term in office, it had been virtually unheard of in modern times for U.S. government officials to publicly tie the nation to a specific set of religious beliefs. Trump’s cabinet members have changed that norm.”  Boy that phrase “in modern times” is doing a lot of work here.

Calls to prayer and thanksgiving may be new to the old media staffed by too many young, but they’d raise no eyebrows from those who actually founded the country, like John Adams. who wrote, “The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.”  We can go on and on with such language from John Adams to John Kennedy, never mind FDR’s D-Day prayer—the largest public prayer in history up to that point.

Just now, this country could use exactly what the White House sponsored, and a lot less of what the Mainstream Media is offering.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and the US Department of Justice struck a blow against the trans industry in a new settlement:

• Ten million dollars.
• And a new, first-in-the-nation clinic to unwind the damage done to children caught up in the pediatric-sex-change industry's machinations. Stripping five of its practitioners of access to more potential victims.

Texas Children's Hospital in Houston agreed to end its pediatric sex-change practice, pay $10 million in penalties while opening the nation’s first detransition center to assist victims of this predatory industry.

This settlement also vindicates Dr. Ethan Haim, who blew the whistle on the fraud – and got targeted by the Biden-era DOJ and the medical industry for retaliation.

Haim faced criminal prosecution under a ginned-up HIPAA complaint that could have put him in prison for ten years.

This settlement gives justice to Texas children maimed and sterilized by a despicable medical establishment. Dr. Haim deserves justice too, along with his vindication.

Recently, a professor of Politics at Princeton wrote an op-ed pointing out how many of his students—and students at other colleges—simply are unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments.  He writes, “they lack religious literacy, and their ignorance of religious ideas means they struggle to understand a wide array of Western art, literature and philosophy.”

They also wouldn’t understand a great deal of art or history, never mind philosophy from Marx to Rousseau—or recognize lines from Shakespeare to our Founding to Frederick Douglass to Lincoln to MLKing, Jr.

This is what the late Richard John Newhaus worried about decades ago: An America that with an increasingly naked public square, bare of any religiosity, or recognition of religious faith or culture. What Newhaus feared is now is now nearly complete, when students at major universities are now illiterate in the cornerstone of Western Civilization.

Many states right now are debating posting the Ten Commandments in K-12 classrooms.  This wouldn’t be a parochial decision, it would, rather, constitute necessary basic and remedial education.

In an age of fleeting stories fed by a constant conveyor belt of crisis and frenzy, keeping us all in a common state of agitation, with little ability to focus on the meaningful, let us do exactly that as we prepare for Memorial Day, coming up in another weekend.

The great historian Wilfred McClay once wrote “Without memory, and without the stories by which our memories are carried forward, we cannot say who, or what, we are.  Without them, our life and thought dissolve into a meaningless, unrelated rush of events.”

The commemoration of those who—in the words of James Garfield—“made immortal their patriotism and their virtue” in defending this country gave us the greatest lessons in who and what we are, and with the greatest of meaning.  Who and what we are matters—thus the memory of them and what they did for us matters.  They are antidotes to meaninglessness.

We can celebrate 250 years of our country’s life because of those we reflect on this Memorial Day. 

Thank God for these heroes.

With the background of Russia's invasion and ongoing war against Ukraine, recently this astounding headline from the BBC:

“Putin says he thinks Ukraine conflict coming to an end.”

Now for perspective: Just consider last weekend's annual Victory Day parade in Moscow. It commemorates the end of World War II

What's notable this year is not what happened, but what didn't happen.

Russia couldn't afford to hold the parade as usual because Ukraine, as it turns out, has been so ingenious and so aggressive with its use of drones that Putin couldn't afford to hold that kind of military parade in Moscow. It would've been one giant magnet for a massive undertaking and attack by Ukraine.

This is a game changer.

Russia has now lost 350,000 men.

If you're a strong man, an autocrat in this kind of system, you have to appear strong and invincible.

You can't be a political strongman and a leader that gets into this kind of quagmire.

Putin is running out of time. Russians know it and Vladimir Putin knows it.

Donald Trump finally got his response from Iran. Will he act on it?

Last week, Trump had sent a 14-point framework to mediators in Islamabad for reaching a peace accord with Iran. Trump insisted that the IRGC surrender its highly enriched uranium, agree to verifiably end its pursuit of nuclear weapons, and stop attacking international shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran demanded that the US recognize the strait as Iranian sovereign territory and pay war reparations.

Trump responded by calling the IRGC’s terms as “stupid” and “totally unacceptable.” Yet Trump also insisted that a deal could be reached with the regime.

That is an unfortunate illusion—something Trump maintains despite all evidence to the contrary. Iran violated its terms almost immediately in the Strait and Iran continues to threaten the strait. 

The ceasefire is dead.

Trump has to either follow through on consequences or cut bait and walk away with Iran’s regime nearly as dangerous as ever. The decision point has arrived.

The Trump administration has launched an investigation into Smith College—one of the seven historical all-women colleges in the American Northeast.

Why the investigation?

Well, Smith College is and has been since 2015—admitting biological males.

The “seven sisters” have been granted an exemption, going all the way back to the 1970’s to Title IX legislation. They were allowed to be restrictive as women’s colleges.

The Trump administration’s basically saying you can’t have it both ways—that is: claim this historic exemption or you can admit biological males.

President Trump made the point very clear point in his second inaugural address:

He said: “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”

I will argue that was one of the most important and courageous statements a President of the United States has made in recent years. To his credit, he’s been pushing this through.

It’s a necessary step towards the restoration of cultural sanity and for that clarity.

Since the battle with Iran began on February 28, there’ve been so many reports of “deals” with the rump regime atop the ruins of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps that it seems almost silly to respond to another one.

But I trust Israeli journalist Amit Segal. On Wednesday, Segal summed up the supposed framework. The most salient part is said to include—and I quote:

“Negotiations are still underway on the duration of the uranium enrichment freeze. Three sources said the freeze would last at least 12 years, and one source estimated the final outcome would be 15 years.”

That—in and of itself— makes this a terrible proposed “deal,” one that would draw fierce criticism from the GOP’s Iran hawks who want President Trump to “finish the job”, no enrichment of uranium period and finish the job in dramatic fashion.

President Trump doesn’t surrender leverage. He’s got it. We have to hope he uses every ounce of it.

Talking politics with your average young male these days, chances are you will hear all kinds of odd theories coming from the Pied Pipers of Podcastistan. You will hear them mentioning “experts” nobody heard of until about 10 minutes ago or until they were discovered by these podcasters because of their contrary, and often, conspiratorial thinking.

Young men, especially, are attracted to this novel “wisdom,” and they are so prone because, as they will tell you, mainstream institutions have been untruthful over the years. But because some institutions that we used to rely on and respect have been taken over by partisanship and been wrong doesn’t mean that all normative thinking and scholarship is a lie or cannot be trusted, or that people nobody have ever heard of are the replacements of true wisdom.

We dismiss and ignore this fallacious thinking at our collective peril.

The task of the serious is to be able to discern truth from fiction and greatness from mediocrity. In these critical times, that task has never been more important than now.

Today’s Democrats seem to be trying a new take on the “Extreme Makeover” reality show.

Their offshoot: I’d call it “Extremist Makeover.”

And we see it in their likely candidate for Senate in Maine.

It looks pretty close to certain Democrats be nominating oysterman Graham Platner in the Pinetree state.

He is not a "liberal." Platner is not even a "leftist." He’s an extremist. For years, he had a tattoo of a death head worn proudly by the Nazi era SS, Hitler’s worst of the worst.

It was—and remains—a vile symbol worn by guards at the concentration-extermination camps.

Maine’s current and—I trust—future Senator is Susan Collins.

Collins and Platner could not be more different.

It’s rare to have a Susan Collins represent your state from a position of power and influence do so with class and humility. To trade that in for a death’s skull and online bigotry It doesn’t seem like a bet Mainers are going to make.