.If they would rather die, perhaps they had better do so and decrease the surplus population.

With that quote, Ebenezer Scrooge makes perfectly clear the true political message of A Christmas Carol.

Dickens was writing amidst a wave of hysteria about population growth triggered by Thomas Malfus, who argued that reproduction would exceed growth in food.

Scrooge was both anti procreation and anti-marriage.

Of course, Scrooge and Malfus who inspired him turned out to be wrong.

His nephew, Fred, and the ghost of Christmas present turned out to be right.

But the lessons from A Christmas Carol ought to give us strength today as well, as we press back against a message of outright hostility to family so prevalent among the woke left.

There is no such thing as surplus population.

God bless us everyone.

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Over the last few weeks, Donald Trump has ratcheted up pressure on Nicholas Maduro to leave Venezuela.

The US has plenty of good reasons to force the Marxist dictator from power, narco trafficking, human rights violations, and flooding the US with transnational criminal gang members among them.

Perhaps the biggest threat Maduro poses, is his partnership with Hezbollah in Iran. Those ties go back to 1999 and Hugo Chavez, and Hezbollah is involved in every aspect of Maduro's criminal enterprises.

Iran's proxy army has established its own network in Venezuela and serves the Iranian regime's ambitions to destroy what its mullahs call the great Satan.

The mainstream media in the US have rarely reported on this partnership, but others have sent up warnings. The Atlantic Council warned five years ago that Hezbollah is equal to the cartels in organized crime and terror in the Western hemisphere.

That threat extends across Latin America, but Maduro's regime is its nexus in the region.

Donald Trump understands this threat and that America has to act now to stop it.

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Norman Podhoretz died last week at the age of 95.

A long-time editor of Commentary magazine was, simply put, one of the conservative intellectual giants of the last three-quarters of a century.

For me, Commentary magazine was added to National Review as my Christmas list “asks” when I was in college.

Since then, Commentary has never not been a part of my intellectual life.

It was Podhoretz’s memoir “Breaking Ranks,” that put the intellectual puzzle together for me—and how much the intellectual battles of post-World War II America mattered.

He spelled out the ideas and the fact that they had to be fought for: Communism was evil and could be contained and even defeated.

It may, or may not, be true that "No Podhoretz, no President Reagan," but that very well might be the case. He was a giant.

I never met him.

I was fortunate enough to interview him.

And I know firsthand what a great American Norman Podhoretz was.

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