Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – Feminism

Feminism is no longer a niche academic theory or a movement confined to protest marches. It has become one of the most powerful cultural forces shaping law, education, family life, workplace policy, and even the way Americans understand human identity itself. That alone makes it a critical issue for voters. What began as a campaign…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – Venezuelan Drug Smugglers

The issue of Venezuelan drug smuggling sits at the intersection of national security, public safety, foreign policy, and media credibility. It is not merely a question of interdiction at sea or military authority overseas; it is a test case for how Americans assess intelligence claims, weigh executive power, and discern truth amid competing political narratives.…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – The Family

The family is not a niche issue, a private lifestyle preference, or a sentimental talking point reserved for holidays and greeting cards. It is the most basic social institution in any civilization and the primary mechanism by which moral norms, economic stability, and social trust are transmitted from one generation to the next. When families…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – Welfare Programs

Before examining partisan positions, the term welfare programs must be defined carefully. Sloppy definitions lead to sloppy thinking, and sloppy thinking leads to bad policy. In contemporary political debate, the word “welfare” is often used imprecisely to refer to any government benefit, which obscures meaningful distinctions between social insurance, entitlement programs, and means-tested assistance. Defining…

What is Electioneering, and Why Should We Care About it?

Electioneering refers to efforts aimed at influencing how individuals vote, particularly when those efforts occur at or near the time and place of voting. While political advocacy is an essential feature of democratic life, electioneering becomes problematic when it intrudes upon the voting process itself. In contemporary legal and civic discussions, electioneering commonly includes: The…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – USAID Funding

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) occupies a curious place in American public life. It is rarely discussed in everyday political conversation, seldom appears in campaign debates, and is often described in vague terms such as “foreign aid,” “humanitarian assistance,” or “development work.” Yet USAID controls tens of billions of taxpayer dollars, operates…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – Religious Liberty

Religious liberty is not a side issue in American life. It is one of the load-bearing pillars of the constitutional order, and when it weakens, the entire structure of a free society begins to creak. The Founders did not treat religious freedom as a hobby right or a private eccentricity. They treated it as a…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – Surrogacy and In Vitro Fertilization

Surrogacy and in vitro fertilization (IVF) are often discussed as niche medical or personal issues—matters best left to doctors, infertile couples, and private contracts. That framing is misleading. These practices now sit squarely at the intersection of law, economics, technology, ethics, and public policy. They raise foundational questions about how American society understands human life,…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – China Foreign Policy

American foreign policy toward China is no longer an abstract concern reserved for diplomats, think tanks, or defense analysts. It has become a kitchen-table issue that affects jobs, prices, national security, religious liberty, and America’s long-term survival as a free and sovereign nation. For this reason alone, China policy deserves careful attention from American voters.…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: The Ukraine – Russia Conflict

The Ukraine–Russia war did not suddenly appear in February 2022, even though that date marks Russia’s full-scale invasion. The conflict is the culmination of decades of unresolved geopolitical tensions following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. When the USSR dissolved, Ukraine emerged as an independent nation but inherited a complicated legacy: deep cultural…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – University Activism

American universities have long been viewed as places of learning, debate, and intellectual formation. For much of the nation’s history, higher education was understood as a training ground for future leaders—men and women shaped not only by technical knowledge but by habits of reasoned argument, civic responsibility, and respect for pluralism. Over the last decade,…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: K-12 Public Education

Public education is not a narrow policy dispute. It sits at the crossroads of culture, economics, parental authority, national cohesion, and the future moral imagination of the country. Few institutions touch more Americans more directly or more persistently than the public school system. Over fifty million children attend public K–12 schools each year, and nearly…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation – Abortion

Abortion is not a peripheral policy dispute. It is one of the most morally serious, socially consequential, and politically divisive issues in American life. Unlike debates over tax rates, regulatory policy, or even foreign affairs, abortion directly concerns the deliberate ending of developing human life. For this reason alone, it commands sustained attention from voters…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: Gay Marriage

The question of gay marriage occupies a unique and enduring place in modern American political life because it is not merely a policy dispute. It is a disagreement about the nature of marriage itself, the role of the state in redefining long-standing social institutions, and the moral framework that undergirds law, family, and civil society.…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: Energy Policy

Energy policy is not an abstract debate reserved for economists, environmental activists, or politicians in Washington. It reaches directly into the daily life of every American household. Energy determines the price of gasoline at the pump, the cost of heating a home in winter, the reliability of the electrical grid during summer heat waves, the…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: Policing and Racism Claims

Policing is one of those public issues that touches ordinary Americans far more directly than abstract debates in Washington. Unlike foreign policy or monetary theory, policing is experienced at street level—when a family calls 911, when a business owner locks up at night, when parents decide whether their children can safely walk home from school.…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: The Second Amendment

The Second Amendment is not a niche or technical policy question. It is one of the most emotionally charged, philosophically revealing, and politically consequential issues in American public life. Few topics more clearly expose the differences between how Americans understand liberty, government authority, public safety, and human nature itself. For voters, the Second Amendment functions…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: Crime and Punishment

Crime and punishment sit near the foundation of any functioning civilization. Long before debates over taxation, healthcare, or environmental policy arise, a society must answer a basic question: Will law-abiding citizens be protected, and will wrongdoing be punished fairly and consistently? If the answer is unclear or evasive, everything else begins to wobble. For American…

Critical Issues Dividing the Party and the Nation: Israel Foreign Policy

American foreign policy toward Israel is not an abstract, distant concern reserved for diplomats and academics. It is a concrete issue that touches U.S. national security, economic stability, energy markets, counterterrorism, constitutional governance, and the moral credibility of American leadership abroad. For voters attempting to weigh party platforms seriously, Israel functions as a kind of…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: Civil Rights

Few political phrases carry as much moral weight in American public life as civil rights. It is a term that evokes the nation’s highest ideals—liberty, equality before the law, and protection from unjust government power. Because of this moral weight, civil rights has become one of the most contested and misused concepts in modern political…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: Cannabis Legalization

Cannabis legalization has moved from the political margins to the center of American public debate in little more than two decades. What was once treated almost exclusively as a criminal justice matter is now discussed in terms of personal liberty, public health, state revenue, social equity, and federalism. Today, marijuana policy affects tens of millions…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: Election Integrity

Election integrity is not a fringe concern, nor is it a recent invention of partisan politics. It sits at the foundation of a constitutional republic. If citizens cannot trust that elections are conducted honestly, transparently, and according to the law, then every downstream political outcome becomes suspect. Laws may still be enforced, courts may still…

Critical Issues Dividing the Parties and the Nation: Free Speech

Free speech is not a fashionable abstraction or a luxury for polite societies. It is a structural necessity for a constitutional republic. The First Amendment’s protection of speech, press, religion, assembly, and petition is not an ornament added for decoration; it is the load-bearing wall that allows every other liberty to stand. At its core,…

Critical Issues Dividing The Parties and the Nation: Immigration and the Border

Immigration and border policy is one of the most persistent, polarizing, and consequential issues in contemporary American politics. It sits at the intersection of national security, economic opportunity, humanitarian concern, rule of law, and national identity. For many voters, it drives electoral choices, affects local public services, and stokes powerful cultural emotions. Yet despite its…

Silencing the Saints: The Left’s Hypocrisy on Faith and Public Life

Americans live in a strange moment. For all our talk about “free speech,” “pluralism,” and “diversity,” there is one voice that many in our cultural elite insist should remain silent: the Christian voice. You hear it in classrooms, corporations, and newsrooms—often delivered with the smirk of enlightened certainty—that “religion has no place in public policy,”…

How the Left Has Hijacked the Word “Dignity”—And Why Christians Must Resist

Western culture is experiencing a quiet but powerful struggle over the meaning of words. Not long ago, terms like love, justice, freedom, compassion, and dignity carried Christian assumptions about truth, human nature, and moral responsibility. But today, many of these old, once-stable words have been redefined under the pressures of progressive ideology. The battle is…

The Left’s Hypocritical Colonization of the West

A college campus can sometimes feel like a confessional without forgiveness. A Western student rises during a seminar on world history, clutching a laptop containing cobalt from Congolese mines, to denounce “the evils of European colonization.” Around the table, heads nod in solemn agreement. No one dares to point out that the student’s own worldview—steeped…

The Left’s Use of the Words “Fascists”, “Nazis” and “Gestapo”

In today’s political climate, it’s become common for leftist activists to call conservatives “fascists”, “Nazis” and “Gestapo”.   These words once described real, murderous regimes.  Now, they’re casually thrown around as insults. Democrat politicians J.B. Pritzker, Tim Walz, Brandon Johnson, Kamala Harris, Stephen Lynch, Enrique Sanchez and General John Kelly , along with countless leftist protesters at…

The Hidden Worldview That Makes Abortion Seem Reasonable

Abortion is not merely a political controversy. It is the outward symptom of a deeper disease—a clash of worldviews about what it means to be human, what it means to suffer, and what it means to be free. For decades, public debate has circled slogans like “my body, my choice” and “women’s rights,” but these…

The Great Political Shape-Shift: How Progressivism Rewired the American Parties

Most Americans have heard the phrase “the parties switched.” Yet few can explain what that means, when it happened, or how it unfolded. The truth is more complex than the slogans of modern politics. The Democratic and Republican parties did not swap identities overnight; they evolved over nearly two centuries through a combination of moral…

Neo-Marxists and the Goose That Lays the Golden Eggs

Aesop told of a farmer who discovered that one of his geese laid a golden egg each morning. At first, he could hardly believe his fortune. Every day brought him a new treasure. But soon his greed outgrew his patience. He began to imagine how rich he would become if he could get all the…

Will the Real Fascists and Nazis Please Stand Up?

Few words in the modern political vocabulary carry the kind of instant moral weight as fascist and Nazi. They conjure up images of stormtroopers, concentration camps, and the totalitarian crush of human freedom. For that reason alone, they have become the favorite insults hurled by many Progressives, “woke” activists, and cultural Marxists against conservatives and…

When ‘Black Lives Matter’ Meets the Abortion Industry: The Moral Collapse of the Left

Introduction: The Apologist at the Clinic A Christian apologist stood outside a Chicagoland abortion clinic and noticed something strange. The clinic staff, who defended abortion as a “woman’s right,” was wearing apparel emblazoned with the slogan “Black Lives Matter.” The irony was striking: within those very walls, thousands of black infants had been aborted—disproportionately so.…

The Racial Comments of New York Times Journalist Sarah Jeong

For well over a century, The New York Times has cultivated an image as America’s “paper of record.” It has been the publication presidents read each morning, the paper cited in courtrooms and classrooms, the reference point for other journalists. This reputation has rested not only on its breadth of coverage but on a perception—sometimes…

The Hidden Pipeline of Political Funding

If you ask most Americans whether their tax dollars should be spent advancing abortion access, promoting transgender surgeries for minors, or accelerating mass immigration, polling shows that large majorities either strongly oppose or hold significant reservations about such policies. Yet critics allege—and many prominent figures from the political, legal, and watchdog community suspect—that these same…

Gerrymandering and the Battle over America’s Political Maps

Imagine you’re a referee at a basketball game. But before the game starts, one of the teams gets to draw the boundaries of the court—making their basket closer and the opponent’s farther away. That’s not a fair game. Yet something quite similar happens in American politics, and it’s called gerrymandering. At its most basic, gerrymandering…

In Whose Image? Autonomy, Tyranny, and the Crisis of Rule in America

In the political and spiritual battles of our time, the question of who governs us is not merely political—it is theological. At its core lies a deeper question: Who has the right to define good and evil, right and wrong, truth and lie? For Christians, the answer is simple: God alone has that right, and…

Lessons in Progressive Deception: Crime Statistics

Crime, by its very nature, thrives in the shadows. But what happens when those shadows are cast not by criminals alone, but by the very people charged with reporting, prosecuting, and explaining crime to the public? In recent years, a troubling pattern has emerged: crime statistics—long a tool for policymakers, journalists, and citizens to assess…

Can You be Pro-Choice but Not Pro-Abortion?

The Semantic Divide – Is “Pro-Choice” Truly Neutral? One of the most persistently slippery terms in modern political discourse is “pro-choice.” To the casual ear, it sounds almost harmless—who could be against choice? Americans value liberty, autonomy, and self-determination. But when applied to the abortion debate, “pro-choice” becomes a euphemism that disguises the underlying reality:…

A Christian Response: “Galatians 3:28 Erases Gender and Hierarchy”

It’s one of the most cited verses in “Progressive” Christianity—and one of the most misunderstood: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”—Galatians 3:28 (ESV) To many on the Left—both in secular circles and within theological liberalism—this…

A Christian Response: “God Made Me This Way”

One of the most emotionally compelling arguments offered by progressive Christians and LGBTQ advocates is this: God made me this way. I was born gay (or trans, or nonbinary), and since I am created in God’s image, my identity must be good. The force of this claim rests not in Scripture itself but in a…

A Christian Response: “Jesus Affirmed The Marginalized, Including LGBTQ+ People”

A growing number of progressive theologians and social commentators argue that Jesus would have supported the LGBTQ movement. Their rationale is based not on clear biblical teaching, but on selective storytelling: Jesus was a friend of tax collectors, prostitutes, and sinners. He loved the marginalized. He would have loved and affirmed LGBTQ people too. This…

A Christian Response: “Paul was a Man of his Time”

In recent years, a popular argument has gained traction among progressive theologians and LGBTQ advocates: Paul lived in a patriarchal, pre-scientific culture. His views on sexuality—especially homosexuality—reflected the norms of his time, not divine moral absolutes. We’ve evolved since then. Love is what matters. This argument sounds reasonable to many modern ears. After all, we…

A Christian Response: “Justice Demands Affirmation”

In recent decades, the biblical word justice has undergone a dramatic reinterpretation—particularly within progressive Christian circles and the wider cultural Left. The prophets, we’re told, were concerned with justice—therefore, if Christians today do not “affirm” LGBTQ identities and other so-called marginalized groups, they are violating the very heart of God’s call. The oft-quoted verses include:…

You Might Be Woke If….

“Woke” once meant being alert to injustice. Today, it describes a full-fledged ideology—a secular religion rooted in critical theory, radical subjectivism, and revolutionary politics. It teaches people to see all of life through the lens of oppression, privilege, and identity group conflict. The “woke worldview” believes that truth is socially constructed, moral norms are oppressive,…