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Townhall Review Commentary brings together political commentary and analysis from Salem Media's leading conservative talk-radio hosts.
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Seth Leibsohn: As Commencement Season Closes
4d ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeWith 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.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Carol Platt Liebau: Depriving Our Students of the Diversity That Matters
5d ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeIt’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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hugh Hewitt: Trusting Trump
6d ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeAs 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Seth Leibsohn: Miseducating a Nation
1w ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeIn 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hugh Hewitt: Because They Gave All
2w ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeThis 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Carol Platt Liebau: A National Treasure
2w ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeJustice 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Hugh Hewitt: An Argument the Nation Should Be Having
2w ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeIs 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Seth Leibsohn: A Proper Perspective on Our Public Prayers
2w ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeNumerous 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Ed Morrissey: Justice for Ethan Haim and Texas Children
2w ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeTexas 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Seth Leibsohn: Our Dangerous Illiteracy
2w ago00:01:00Tap to summarizeRecently, 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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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