Dependency, Corruption, and the Bill Coming Due The national news is now reporting roughly a billion dollars in suspected waste, fraud, and abuse in Minnesota’s state‑administered programs that distribute federal money—SNAP, Medicaid, rental assistance, and small‑business COVID loans, particularly in Somali communities in Minneapolis and its suburbs. Even more troubling are whistleblower claims from inside […]
Does your interlocutor believe in a universal moral law binding on all human beings? That single question determines whether political argument will rest on reason or dissolve into pure passion. A moral predicate is the foundational moral assumption on which all subsequent reasoning depends. Without some shared base, rational debate becomes impossible. The historical foundations of the American […]
Stop Scouting the Opposition—Start Perfecting Our Own Game Plan When the great UCLA basketball coach John Wooden was asked how much time he spent scouting opposing teams, his answer was direct—none. “We spend all our time thinking about what we do, and we hope our opponents spend all their time thinking about what we do.” […]
Every Christmas Eve since 1949, The Wall Street Journal has reprinted former editor Vermont Royster’s timeless essay, “In Hoc Anno Domini”. It reminds readers that the world changed forever on the night Jesus was born—and that from that moment began humanity’s long, uneven march toward freedom. Reprinted often in The Gem State Patriot News, Royster’s piece remains worth pondering […]
Suppose a king of a small country—or a mayor of a small city—declares that John Livingston must buy everyone in town a steak dinner. Their claim of legitimate authority to make such a decree, whether granted or presumed, is one thing; the legitimacy of the decree itself is quite another. Here, moral right and legal […]
In every family, including my own, there are those struggling with anger, dissociation, and fragmentation that at the least tear the family apart and, at worst, erupt into violent acts like the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, allegedly committed by their son. This sort of tragedy is played out many times a day […]
How big a mess? No one really knows, because those running the bureaucracy—and those supposed to cover it in the press—have shown remarkably little curiosity about what is happening inside our state government. The LUMA accounting system, for example, has been associated with serious implementation problems, including duplicated payments and delays in reconciling transactions across […]
My Quaker grandmother told me a story early in my life about “The Seed of Hate.” The theme is deeply biblical, but it appears in other religious traditions and cultures as well. For Christians, the story centers on the idea that hatred begins as a small seed in the heart and, if allowed to grow, […]
In a recent Wall Street Journal review, University of Virginia sociology professor Scott Galloway’s book Notes of Being a Man confronts a crisis that has become impossible to ignore. He writes that his female students—bright, capable, and ambitious—express growing concern about the state of young men. They describe brothers living in parents’ basements, boyfriends addicted to online pornography, and […]
Sharing and Giving: The Moral Weight of Ownership There is a subtle but profound difference between sharing and giving. Modern ears often treat the words as interchangeable, but they represent opposing moral postures toward the world. G. K. Chesterton once described this difference vividly: sharing is a collectivist act, a gesture without full participation of the heart, while […]
When I was in high school, my father gave me several books to read over a summer written by Admiral Daniel V. Gallery. Admiral Gallery was a famously combative Navy officer who, twice in his career, found himself on the edge of a court‑martial. In his book Eight Bells and All Is Well; he meticulously described […]
Football in Ohio meets the Webster definition of religion: the belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers, regarded as creating and governing the universe. Football there is not just a game; it is a cosmos with its own gods, saints, and commandments. There is an old story about a Michigan man who […]