Townhall Review | Conservative Commentary On Today's News

Ronald Reagan used to quote the philosopher Montesquieu: “The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principle upon which it was founded.”  Reagan cited this point to warn us as more and more policies were enacted violating our principles of self- and limited government.  Later in his career, Reagan would also warn about our decayed and degraded state of knowledge about our own history.

Indeed, today, Americans’ knowledge about history and civics is at record lows, helping explain our new acceptance and promotion of literal socialist policies and politics in America.  Our education system, our schools, have failed us.  Thank God, however, a few historians have given us a gift to help us recoup the things we used to know.  Particularly beautiful and helpful is Allen Guelzo and James Haskins new two-volume history of Western Civilization: “The Golden Thread.”

Enough cannot be said about such a work as Guelzo’s and Haskins’—nor its scholarship, readability, and beautiful presentation.  Their work comes just in time, and could not be more necessary.

British police arrested five young men near an air base used by American forces. They were suspected of explosives offenses and preparing a terrorist act.

Today, all five are out on bail. Authorities call them British nationals but won’t release their names. Police are investigating possible foreign-state involvement. Iran denies any role.

The public’s been told almost nothing. And while investigators are still working out what happened, every suspect has been released.

Police say bail conditions are strict. But armed officers responded. Bomb disposal experts examined the scene. If the threat was serious enough for that, why is releasing all five safe?

These men certainly deserve due process. But official secrecy and pompous reassurances are no substitute for protecting the public. This kind of politically correct, cowardly complacency is how once-great civilizations die.

25 Years After 9/11 The Americans and British are still wrestling with the big challenge we face and a crucial question:

Is the big challenge Islam?—or Islamism?

The Economist magazine recently published a notable cover story.

Where they argued —and I quote: “Islam poses no serious danger. But Islamism and the fear of Islam do.”

Then they argue Islam is not a threat, but Islamism is. They define it as a fringe ideology in Islam, the belief that government and society should be guided by Islamic principles.

The problem for that theory is that central to Islam not just Islamism, but Islam, is the combination of Islam as a religion and a government. It’s not a peripheral idea to Islam. It’s not a misreading. It’s in the Quran.

When you look at Islam, you are looking at a civilizational project. You are looking at a civilizational challenge.

And quite honestly we had better recognize it as such.

We all learned it – or should have – in civics class. Congress makes the laws. The executive branch enforces them. And judges interpret them. But some federal judges in Minneapolis have forgotten it. 

Patrick Schiltz, until recently chief judge of Minnesota’s federal district court, just gave a remarkable 90-minute interview to the New York Times. Schiltz and other judges were sharply critical of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. And as cases poured in, the judges met, consulted, and developed templates for court orders. 

Consider that. Judges personally opposed to administration policy were coordinating their rulings on cases challenging it. 

Judges must rule against any president when the law requires it. But judges shouldn’t become a coordinated opposition to policies just because they personally oppose them.  

That undermines faith in an impartial judiciary — and in a fundamental safeguard of American government.

In New York City this week, the United Nations is hosting 81st session of the U.N. General Assembly.

World leaders, you can count on this, will be discussing the deal President Trump announced with Denmark and Greenland they will allow the U.S. to deploy military throughout virtually all of the nation of Greenland.

President Trump posted: “The United States will forever have the complete ability to do what is necessary in Greenland.”

This is a big win for the U.S., Greenland - which is a semi-autonomous region of Denmark – and it’s big for Denmark itself.

As we watch the world order being re-shaped so dramatically, the polar ice cap becomes a place of vulnerability and military strategy particularly as we see the northern seas become more navigable for sea vessels.

This is the work of serious statesmanship.

So: When the ink is cleared on this one, let’s be thankful.

President Trump is right on this one. This is a three way win.

Let’s take it.

Canada legalized Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, in June of 2016—with promises of compassion. More than 100,000 assisted deaths later, the reality looks far different.

Last year, Canada had more MAID deaths than America had gun homicides -- despite America’s much larger population.

And now troubling questions are being raised about MAID. 

The family of eighty-three-year old Bridgitte Stegemann says she rejected assisted suicide because of her Christian faith. Later, they say, she lacked the ability to consent and wept inconsolably after learning she was scheduled to die.

  Forty-eight hours later, she was dead. Her family says she never gave final verbal consent. They describe her dying with her hands clasped in prayer, covered in her own blood after a botched attempt to start an IV.

That isn’t “death with dignity.”

It’s something far darker.

With CNN, Politico, and MS NOW in high dudgeon over being denied access to the White House, you’d think it was the end of democracy.  What it is is the end of hypocrisy.

For years, CNN and her confederates have been unified in distorting the news when it comes to Donald Trump, and burying news about the Biden administration. So much so that their behavior hardly gives them any moral high ground.  We should recall well their efforts to stifle reporting on Joe Biden’s mental condition as well as their complicity in covering up the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, including uncritically platforming the 51 intelligence experts who abused their security clearances to further conceal political damage to the Biden presidency.  They were silent when the Biden administration tried to create a disinformation board and said little else about the exposure of the manifold Biden efforts to censor social media.

As they preen over their rights to report truth to power, let us not drown in their crocodile tears about their commitments to truth and free speech.

The Supreme Court has long recognized that parents — not the state — have the primary right to direct their children’s upbringing.

But Massachusetts apparently wasn’t listening.

In December 2024, the state took a 15-year-old girl named Sophie from her home. Her school had been helping her socially transition. When her Catholic parents refused to use a male name or support a gender transition, they lost custody. Her family says they’re now barred from contacting her.

This is un-American. Massachusetts doesn’t care more about Sophie than her parents do. And holding traditional Catholic beliefs shouldn’t cost parents their child.

How Sophie chooses to live once she’s an adult will be her decision. But while she’s still a minor, disagreement with her parents — even over something this profound — isn’t sufficient reason for the state to replace them.

Sophie belongs with her family.

It seems like every morning lately brings a new warning about artificial intelligence along the lines of, “We’re all going to die!”

Dario Amodei—Anthropic’s chief executive—struck the panic chord in a recent essay, arguing AI was advancing too quickly for researchers to continue building it safely.

Then billionaire tech investor David Sacks struck back. In a post on X, Sacks rejected the “AI doomerism,” landing a roundhouse punch:

“Stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission,” Sacks wrote.

“Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability.”

China’s President Xi is not going to be satisfied with a silver medal in the AI Olympics.

Neither should we.

Unless and until Congress says “stop” and the president agrees with a signature, the private sector gets to run with the AI ball as far and as fast as it wants.

205 Democrats voted early this month to leave the door open to packing the Supreme Court.

Everyone needs to be paying attention.

The original Constitution was silent as to the number of justices on the high court, but from 1866 to 1869, a combination of three statutes and one constitutional amendment put a constitutional imprimatur on the number nine. 

The Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 9, 1868, by the necessary number of states then, and Secretary of State William Seward formally proclaimed the Fourteenth Amendment as part of the Constitution on July 28, 1868.

Less than a year after ratification and certification of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress completed the work of the Reconstruction Era with regard to the Supreme Court with the passage of the Judiciary Act of 1869.

When he came into office, President, Ulysses S. Grant, promptly signed that law.

Like the pro-slavery Democrats of antebellum America, the Democrats of today would rather wreck the Constitution than abide by it.

After commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11, let’s remember the adage: when you lose something, do not lose the lesson. 

Did we learn the lessons of 9/11?

Those lessons include understanding the difference between good and evil, and never to confuse the two—calling evil good or good evil.  That has not been learned.

There are vast networks of terrorists in the world—all who want to destroy America and her allies. Much of the terrorist intellectual mindset now has great support in America, itself. Whether we are speaking of allies of the Muslim Brotherhood on our campuses or in Senate and House races, or in the fulminations of too many political activists, pro-Islamist anti-Americanism is more accepted and embraced in America today than at any other time in our history.

The lesson now?  We cannot abandon the courage of our convictions from our other anniversary—that is: 1776.  Those convictions, and the teachings about them, in our schools and in our politics, have never been more needed. 

We must do everything in our power to reinfuse them.

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.