Townhall Review | Conservative Commentary On Today's News

The Iranian regime has waged war against the United States for nearly 47 years.

The president clearly thought that we had sufficiently weakened the regime—and he’d be able to strike a deal. Indeed, he spent 60 days trying.

But the shootdown of our Apache helicopter may have changed things.

The Iranian regime has given Trump plenty of reasons to walk away from the negotiating table, starting from the very first hours of the so-called ceasefire in the Persian Gulf. Vahidi violated the agreement from the very start, imposing an extortionate "fee" system for sailing through the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz and firing on commercial vessels that refused to comply.

Trump has invested a lot of his credibility and trust in the IRGC's negotiations. Now, however, Trump sounds as though he suddenly woke up to the Sunk Cost Fallacy, saying they’ve taken too long and “now they will have to pay the price!!!”

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: This war has to be fought to the finish.

The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence is approaching quickly.

The document—as I often point out to my listeners—is, to quote Abraham Lincoln, an “apple of gold” protected by the “frame of silver” that is the Constitution he borrowed from Psalms there.

All Americans—indeed all the free world—have a lot to celebrate in this our 250th year of independence.

The Declaration asserted the existence of "rights" of individuals that exist before any government — no matter the form of that government— comes into being:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The great day of the fourth is, from beginning to end, about love of our country because our country defends our individual rights, rights derived—back to the Declaration— from “the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God.”

It is quite a gift that we have been given—a gift that needs to be defended.

Ronald Reagan used to ask: “if no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?”  But to have self-government, we must depend on many things, foremost among them: Trust. Over the past decade, credibility in major institutions has plummeted.

Given the delays and changing results in the recent California elections, we have another exhibit of the growing distrust in our elections. Alleging fraud in seeing Spencer Pratt sink to third place after the now-second place finisher had previously conceded her loss is said to be paranoid. But here comes the New York Times, with a headline: there is “a lack of evidence of any widespread fraud.”  The word “widespread” carries a lot of water in suggesting at least some fraud, no?

Voting day needs to be voting day, not month. ID must be required; ballot harvesting, stopped; mailed ballots, postmarked.  Nothing could undermine our experiment in self-government more than distrust in the legitimacy of our elections.

Over the past couple of weeks, President Trump has shifted pressure for ending the war from Iran to Israel. He pressed for a ceasefire in Lebanon to incentivize the IRGC to make a deal. Hezbollah refused to comply, continuing to launch missile attacks on Northern Israel. That escalated over the weekend, with Iran launching missiles at Israel and the IDF responding.

Trump insists the attacks are distracting from a deal that—for two months—he’s promised is close to completion. Thus far, though, the IRGC refuses to comply with the terms of the current ceasefire.

Israel has waited for 20 years for Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah and for the terrorist proxy to comply with the ceasefire brokered last year.

Trump’s current pressure strategy is misplaced.

Israel is not an obstacle to peace in the region. Trump needs to apply pressure to the regime in Iran, and to Hezbollah and Hamas as well to comply with the agreements they have already made.

Until they do, what value is there in negotiation?

The Maine primary is this Tuesday.

Why is it that Democrats are sticking with their deeply flawed, Nazi-tattoo-wearing Graham Platner?

Drip, drip, drip come the revelations, but Democrats are standing proudly behind the deeply troubled candidate.

On Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was pressed by reporters about his backing of Platner after the latest batch of awful headlines about Platner’s increasingly chaotic campaign.

“I met with Graham Platner today. We will beat Susan Collins and take back the Senate.” Shumer went on to repeat that refrain four more times before ending the interview.

“Sunk costs” have crippled many a business and life decision, and they plague politics too. Sunk costs are expenses or investments that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. Rational decisions focus on future costs and benefits, not past expenditures. Sunk costs can lead to emotional decisions in business and personal finances. And politics.

Both politically—and morally: Democrats are sinking in Maine.

The next few months are anniversary-heavy for our nation.

Before the fireworks of the 250th Fourth of July begin, try with family and friends to agree on what we are celebrating. Try as well to articulate how we defend what our country has long been committed to.

We’re also only three months away from the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda.

The great and the awful anniversaries are connected by that which the first proclaimed and which the second attempted to end: freedom.

We ought also to spend part of this celebration in reflecting on admiration for the courage of not just those who voted “yes” on the Declaration, but also to who had the courage to actually sign their names to it on August 2, 1776.

This brace of anniversaries should remind every American that ours is a unique and enduring commitment to human liberty.

May we all renew our commitment to the country’s first principles.

As we close in on our nation’s birthday, more and more data give us cause for great concern.

As Abraham Lincoln put it in his time, so too is it true today: “At what point is the approach of danger [to us] to be expected? [I]f it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”

Look around at our civic health just now.  Article IV of our Constitution guarantees us a republican form of government—but, in our major states and cities, we now see elected leaders and political candidates from one of our two major parties that embrace both national and democratic socialism, fascism and communism—we see a party fully embracing hatred of free enterprise as much as constitutionalism and Americanism. 

And: It all comes with a large dose of antisemitism.

This must be pointed out—and reversed.

.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.