Several years ago, I sat down with a group of residency program directors in the offices of the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. The department’s director at the time, Richard Armstrong, was not present, but two representatives from his agency joined us to explain the funding and deployment of assets for the new Idaho […]
The phrase came to me secondhand, but it landed with uncommon force: “People in this country just aren’t hungry enough.” A close friend—recovering from a serious health crisis—told me this after an unexpected immersion in something he had rarely watched before: the evening news. Night after night, from a hospital bed, he observed street demonstrations, […]
Our politics are no longer arguing over omelets; we are arguing over whether eggs even exist. Until we recover a shared moral and ethical foundation, serious debate in America—and in Idaho—will remain nearly impossible. I owe the simplification of this point to a recent letter to the Wall Street Journal by Mr. Erni Laynez, who […]
We have indeed always had coarse political rhetoric in America, and it has often spilled over into actual violence. Yet the quality of our language still matters enormously because coarse language is often a tell for coarse thinking. When senior government officials—whether the heads of law enforcement agencies or cabinet departments—resort to shouting, smearing opponents as “Nazis,” […]
Panels of “experts” are everywhere today—on politics, sports, economics, even religion—and yet their track record for getting things right is remarkably poor. One begins to wonder whether they are experts at all, or simply performers chasing relevance. Consider the American bishops who confidently opined about who would be the next pope. How many were correct? […]
Thirty years ago, I drove from Boise to Fruitland on a cold winter night to watch a Tuesday basketball game between Fruitland and Bishop Kelly. My son was playing for Bishop Kelly, and as I settled into my seat on the nearly empty visitors’ side, I noticed an elderly couple sitting just behind me. Only […]
Over the past several months, I have written a series of articles exploring the relationship between natural law principles and the American Founding. In those pieces, I have engaged a range of books and scholarly articles in an effort to answer a simple but contentious question: are we, in fact, a nation founded on Christian […]
The mainstream press has been clamoring about Xi Jinping’s remarks to President Trump regarding the “Thucydides Trap.” Commentators have rushed to interpret the phrase as a new, ominous warning, with one “expert” suggesting that Xi would never have dared speak in those terms had he not been emboldened by American weakness. According to the New York […]
The episode with Hakeem Jeffries’ comments about SEC football did more than make a headline; it revealed how casually some political leaders are willing to turn individual lives into instruments of their own power. Two days ago, on May 19, Jeffries urged Black athletes to boycott universities in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) whose states he […]
During and after the Covid-19 pandemic, I walked the grounds of The Plantation Golf Course with my granddaughter Lilly. The 100-year-old trees and the rolling, old‑school golf course—with its turtleback greens and white sand traps—set the scene for some of the best conversations of my life. For a grandfather who helped raise five boys, there […]
I recently read a Substack article by Dutch Rojas titled, ”The Language of Compassion Is Doing the Work.” The title is close to the truth—but not quite. My concern is not with the logic of his argument, which is largely sound, but with the linguistic distortion that underlies many progressive approaches to modern social problems. Compassion, properly […]
American politics has drifted into theater, and the reporting of news has followed close behind. What once aimed at informing the public now often entertains it. In that environment, celebrity-seeking politicians’ demagogue for attention, trading reasoned argument for applause lines, while intuition and virtue signaling increasingly substitute for disciplined thought. A recent interview between Representative […]