Townhall Review | Conservative Commentary On Today's News

Last week, Americans commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks carried out by Islamist extremists.

Afterward, our leaders rightly emphasized that America’s quarrel wasn’t with Muslims generally. And millions of peaceful, patriotic Muslims have made America their home.

But tolerance can’t require us to ignore a legitimate question about assimilation. Some beliefs found in significant parts of the Islamic world — about the treatment of women, Jews, religious minorities, or those who leave the faith — are completely at odds with American principles.

America has always welcomed immigrants of every faith. But immigration only works when newcomers are willing to embrace our fundamental values — not when they seek to remake our country according to values Americans have rejected.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, asking whether we’re doing enough to encourage assimilation isn’t bigotry. It’s common sense.

Social media influencer Hasan Piker is now the face of the Democratic party.

Piker wears his Mao jacket and hoses his Twitch audience down with absurd political takes. Piker uses social media to monetize the worst impulses of the extremes in American politics. In the course of doing so, he personally carried the most radical major-party candidate in memory — Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed—to that party’s nomination for the United States Senate.

Piker has now gone so “supernova radical” that some Democratic leaders have tried to rebuke him without even naming him—including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

It’s not going to work.

Piker—and the socialist fever he represents—is repelling the moderate Americans who love the country especially in the Democratic party.

It should not be difficult to say: voters ought to reject Hasan Piker, Abdul-El Sayed, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib and I could go on—by name.

They also ought to be rejected at the ballot box.

When Gloria Steinem died last week, she was mourned across popular culture as a feminist icon. 

But her legacy was a mixed one. Many feminist reforms of the civil rights era were necessary and right — including laws against sex and pregnancy discrimination. 

But Steinem’s brand of feminism also had an anti-male streak that still poisons relations between the sexes today. She popularized the line: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Steinem promoted the idea that women find their greatest fulfillment through work outside the home—and Generations of women and children have paid the price.

She also advocated for the abortion on demand culture that has shaped the course of our nation.

There’s no question: Gloria Steinem lived an influential life. But on her impact? The jury—like our country—is split.

The morning of September 11, 2001 was stunningly beautiful. It was a promising day as it started, and yet it would end as a day of horror that would be indelibly etched into the American psyche. Those beautiful skies carried mass murder and terror. Through those skies flew airliners turned into massive bombs, carrying human passengers who were exploded into dust. 

The sight of the airliners flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, smoke rising from the Pentagon, and then the towers burning and twisting and falling—all of it shown on television screens over and over again. Americans were shocked and declared that the world would never look the same again.

The 25th anniversary of 9/11 demands serious moral reflection. Sadly, the anniversary also underlines massive questions about America’s role in the world, about the war on terror, and about the stark moral realities of our times. We know this, we need to pray. May God bless, guide, and protect the United States of America.

25 years ago this week, radical Islamists slaughtered nearly 3000 people in New York, Washington DC, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The deaths took place in Shanksville when a few dozen Americans stood up to fight the Islamist terrorists and thwarted their plans to drive Flight 93 into either the White House or Capitol Hill.

Let's roll became a mantra to fight back against extremists determined to destroy America and Western values of freedom and self-governance.

The question we face now is, when did we stop rolling?

This somber anniversary arrives as radicals make serious inroads into American politics. In New Jersey, just across from ground zero, a Democrat nominee with previous ties to Al-Qaeda and the Sheik behind the first World Trade Center bombing will likely win a seat in Congress. In Michigan, a Democrat spent the weekend at a conference held by an unindicted co-conspirator in a money laundering scheme that benefited Hamas.

Ronald Reagan warned that freedom is only one generation away from extinction.

Let's roll.

September 11 is not a normal day on the calendar.

Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered by Islamist terrorists. Yet 25 years later, retired Port Authority police officers are asking Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stay away from the commemoration at Ground Zero.

Thirty-seven Port Authority officers died that morning. Now their surviving brothers are pleading: “Please allow us to remember in peace.”

Hochul angered the 9/11 community by illuminating One World Trade Center for Muslim American Heritage Month. Mamdani faces a petition opposing his attendance signed by more than 96,000 people—including grieving families. Both intend to attend anyway.

Ground Zero—especially on the 25th anniversary of that dark day—does not belong to politicians. It belongs to the dead and their families, the cops and firefighters who walked into hell while everyone else ran away.

They do not owe elected officials a backdrop or a lesson in tolerance.

One day. One place. No politics.

They’ve earned that.

Let them have it.

As the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, Americans who remember that day also remember its aftermath.

Along with the shock, horror, suffering and death, there was resolve: We would never forget what happened. And we would never let it happen again.

Thankfully, nothing on that scale has happened since.

But too many Americans seem less alert to the threat of radical Islamism.

A for-profit sharia finance industry operates across America. A North Texas school was established and staffed by relatives of convicted Hamas operatives. And New York’s current mayor has been photographed with an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

For those of us who remember the terror of 9/11, these developments are almost unbelievable. And they’re frightening.

Because we know what happens when people forget the past. They risk repeating it.

“Some people did something,” one prominent Islamist member of Congress put it.  An Islamist candidate for US Senate wrote: those we killed in our response to 9/11 were equally to be mourned as victims just as the Americans killed on 9/11 were. He has also campaigned with a popular broadcaster who claimed the US deserved 9/11.  The Islamist Mayor of New York has posted on X there is no moral difference between those who were killed on 9/11 and those we killed in response.

This is how we lose the distinction between good and evil which, many thought, would never be confused again after 9/11.

Elie Wiesel wrote, “history is to civilization what memory is to individuals.”  For those of us who remember 9/11 accurately, we can never forget it, nor the fact that vast numbers of people with a medieval ideology still want us dead. 

Those engaging in moral equivalence about it are the handmaidens of hate.

If ignored, they will be the authors of our destruction—which, Abraham Lincoln reminded us, can only come from within.

September 11 is not a normal day on the calendar.

Nearly 3,000 Americans were murdered by Islamist terrorists. Yet 25 years later, retired Port Authority police officers are asking Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stay away from the commemoration at Ground Zero.

Thirty-seven Port Authority officers died that morning. Now their surviving brothers are pleading: “Please allow us to remember in peace.”

Hochul angered the 9/11 community by illuminating One World Trade Center for Muslim American Heritage Month. Mamdani faces a petition opposing his attendance signed by more than 96,000 people—including grieving families. Both intend to attend anyway.

Ground Zero—especially on the 25th anniversary of that dark day—does not belong to politicians. It belongs to the dead and their families, the cops and firefighters who walked into hell while everyone else ran away.

They do not owe elected officials a backdrop or a lesson in tolerance.

One day. One place. No politics.

They’ve earned that.

Let them have it.

Now, you probably grew up knowing that socialism doesn't work. It sees its control and most importantly seeks to replace God with government. But this ideology is now moving to the very center of our nation's political life.

I was born under socialist Islamist regime. I remember when my father's company was taken over by the government. I couldn't wait to turn 18 and escape and find freedom in the West.

As these ideologies gain an even stronger foothold in America, we must respond with calm courage and biblical conviction. Silence in the face of evil is not faithfulness.

As the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, New York Governor Kathy Hochul is among the leftist Democrats who seems to have learned nothing and forgotten everything.

Last week, Hochul visited the Islamic Cultural Center School of New York — whose imam blamed Jews for destroying the World Trade Center after the 9/11 attacks.

What’s more, Hochul appeared wearing a hijab. Perhaps she thought she was just respecting a religious tradition but she’s dangerously misguided. The hijab is a symbol of female submission, reflecting the view that women’s bodies are sinful and must be covered lest men be tempted.

Our Constitution protects religious liberty, so Muslim women are free to wear hijabs. But it’s ironic and outrageous that left-wing women — who accuse conservatives of plotting a real-life “Handmaid’s Tale” — embrace a symbol of the very female oppression they claim to fear.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And the IRGC may have never faced a situation as desperate as its predicament at the moment.

Yes: The conflict with Iran has gone on longer than Donald Trump anticipated. The shock and awe campaign in March did massive strategic damage, but the regime has managed to survive.

Diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict have gone nowhere.

Trump finally landed on the most rational approach left. The naval blockade has eliminated Iran’s income from black-market oil. Scott Bessent’s economic D-Day has stripped the IRGC of any other financial resources. The Iranian rial has collapsed. Domestic discontent with the regime will keep increasing to existential levels.

The siege of Iran provides the best chance for success in eliminating a regime that has waged war against the US for 47 years. Trump needs to exercise strategic patience to see this strategy to a successful conclusion – and so do the American people.

UPS will not ship human embryos. But it will ship the drug designed to destroy those innocent human lives.

A shareholder proposal asks UPS to examine the legal, regulatory, and reputational risk of distributing abortion drugs, particularly mifepristone.

The company's answer is that a carrier cannot know what is in every package.

UPS ships firearms under dedicated accounts, contractual agreements, shipper verification, adult signature, and direct-delivery rules. It plainly knows how to identify a product category and apply scrutiny when it decides to.

The Comstock Act has been federal law since 1873, and bars common carriers from transporting drugs intended to produce abortion. More than twenty states now restrict these drugs, including Georgia, where UPS is headquartered.

Firearms are constitutionally protected.

This shipment of abortion drugs is already addressed by federal statute.

What a strange moral code.

UPS needs to get out of the abortion business.

The Islamic Republic is reeling as summer closes.

Operation Economic Outcast is squeezing an already flustered and failing regime.

As that regime grows increasingly desperate, there are warnings that Iran may well be considering one or even many “October surprise” attacks on Israel, the United States or anywhere that its weapons or terrorists can reach. America’s military is certainly prepared—but the public ought to be braced, too.

Aging revolutionaries in Tehran whose dreams and fantasies lie in ruins around them are unlikely to surrender power and go quietly into exile.

So: the idea of a grand gesture through suicidal attacks has to appeal to the remnants of the once powerful but now nearly spent regime. Fanatics with nothing to lose pose a specific kind of threat—and it’s not a rational one.

Americans should support Trump, the efforts of Operation Economic Outcast and the military as the Islamic Republic plays out its last few, desperate moves.

Since the election of the first Islamist to Congress eight years ago, few have wanted to speak candidly out about what Ilhan Omar was saying and stood for—lest they be labeled Islamophobic.

Since that time, political Islam, Islamism, has grown and grown—from the election of a mayor in New York City to several congressional candidates from the East to West Coasts, some of whom win their elections this year. This includes a congressional candidate from Flight 93 Todd Beamer’s hometown who was the righthand man to the Blind Sheikh.  In Michigan, Democrats have nominated an Islamist, looking to serve as U.S. Senator. El-Sayed has defended Sharia law in America, campaigned with Hamas supporters, and is speaking at a Muslim Brotherhood aligned conference next month.

Islamophobia is the irrational fear of Islam. We do not fear a religion whose adherents give this country their effectual support, as George Washington put the test of religious tolerance. But there’s a growing number who wish to exploit our political system for their Islamist subversion.

That fear is not irrational.

While I was visiting the Middle East several years ago, a highly placed government official who's a Muslim himself asked me a troubling question. Why is the Muslim Brotherhood outlawed as a terrorist organization in Saudi Arabia, in Bahrain, in the United Arab Emirates, in Jordan, in Egypt, and yet allowed to flourish in America?

Founded in Egypt in 1928, the brotherhood's history is drenched in blood. It was spawned and inspired groups like Hamas, Al-Qaeda, ISIS.

Now Congress designated the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist entity. This designation act would finally name the brotherhood for what it is and disrupt its financial networks.

Contact your representatives, senators, ask them to support this bill.

Freedom stood up for reality—and the crowd went nuts.

Enes Kanter Freedom attended a WNBA game with a T-shirt that defined a woman as an “adult human female.” The shirt provoked a profane response from Chicago Sky players, leading the league to eject Freedom from the arena. In every possible sense. 

When was the last time anyone saw a player in the NBA, NFL, MLB, or NHL lose their minds and their focus over a T-shirt in the stands? This is the second time in a week for the WNBA in which a team either threatened to expel or outright expelled fans for wearing T-shirts that only expressed support for biology as the definition of "women."

This isn't a sports league. It's a struggle session with cardio. It is the cult of progressivism in microcosm, where dissent has to be silenced and truth banished. It may be a clown show at the WNBA, but writ large, it really is a danger to freedom … not just Enes Kanter Freedom.

The most amazing development on the American political landscape right now is the emergence of socialism. Yeah, I said it, socialism.

Just recently, CBS News launched a major investigative study looking into political support for socialism.

Among the key takeaways are the fact that among those who identify as Democrats, 58% have a positive view of socialism. 58% positive view of socialism. Only 32% of Democrats said they had a positive view of capitalism.

It gets worse. Among respondents with a college degree and even higher 71% say they have a positive view of socialism. The most obvious influence over these students is leftist professors teaching leftist ideologies,

The culture of elite education is teaching university students wrong lessons about the economy, and it's doing so in so many different ways. Students increasing support for socialism shows it, as do the polls.

It's a seismic development when you think about the future of civilization and the future of the United States of America.

Abdul El-Sayed is Hasan Piker and Hasan Piker is Abdul El-Sayed.

That’s the bottom line for Michigan voters considering the race for the  open Senate seat in the upcoming election.

El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee. Piker is the progressive, regressive, transgressive Twitch streamer—a vulgar, hate-filled, racist “streamer,” an online ranter who hates Blacks, Whites, women with seemingly equal passion. He thinks the United States deserved 911, None of this is a hidden secret.

El-Sayed attached himself to Piker’s hip in order to win the Michigan Democratic primary. If El-Sayed somehow fools the Michigan electorate into sending him to D.C. in November, Piker will push aside Bernie Sanders and AOC as the key “kingmaker” in the Democratic Party.

El-Sayed is going to be facing GOP nominee Mike Rogers, a seven-term congressman from Michigan.

Working in Rogers’ favor, Michigan doesn’t want to become known for the craziest hater in the Senate since the Civil War.

Massachusetts recently passed an abortion law, becoming the 10th state that allows for an abortion to take place right up to the moment of birth.

Let us step back to consider that the entire abortion movement and language used to justify it is shrouded in lies and code words.  The word abortion, itself, is a euphemism designed to obscure the killing of a child; the word fetus is used to disguise the object of that procedure, to keep clear a conscience from fully considering what—and who—is being “ended” … or killed.

Reverend Jesse Jackson once asked: “What happens to the mind of a person, and the moral fabric of a nation, that accepts the abortion of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?”  He said, “It is that question, the question of our attitude, our value system, and our mind-set with regard to the nature and worth of life itself that is the central question confronting mankind.” 

Let us pray it is not too late to ask, and answer, that precise question.