For several years, there has been growing concern about the tenor and aggressiveness of a particular class of activists who relentlessly assert their own moral authority through public denunciations and emotional theatrics—what are now commonly labeled “virtue signals.” Their rhetoric often feels less like moral insight and more like a performance of superiority, backed by […]
F. A. Hayek once observed that while you can have capitalism without liberty, you cannot have liberty without capitalism. The moral foundations for both are remarkably similar: rule of law, enforceable contracts, the sanctity of private property, and the core virtues of justice, charity, prudence, and courage. For centuries, some have said that liberty and […]
The Midwestern Farmer–Labor tradition began as a defense of ordered liberty and local independence and, over time, was captured by centralized, progressive forces that now use its rhetoric to justify bureaucratic control and dependency. Understanding that transformation is essential if families today are to teach their children to be both pious and patriotic, and to […]
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 […]