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.…

Media Hall of Shame Series: Daily Kos

Daily Kos is not a traditional news outlet in any meaningful sense—it is an activist-driven blog and opinion platform designed to advance progressive Democratic causes. Founded in 2002 by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, a self-described former libertarian turned “proud progressive,” Daily Kos was born in the early days of the blogosphere as a digital megaphone for…

Media Hall of Shame Series: Alternet

AlterNet is an unabashedly left‑wing digital media platform—with roots reaching back to 1987—founded by the Independent Media Institute and designed to aggregate and amplify progressive content from across the ideological ecosystem. In April 2018, it was acquired by the owners of Raw Story—John K. Byrne and Michael Rogers—who continue to operate it under AlterNet Media…

Media Hall of Shame Series – Jacobin

Jacobin is not your typical news outlet with a thin veneer of objectivity hiding a partisan agenda. It is, proudly and openly, a socialist publication, founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara and based in New York City. Though rooted in the United States, it draws heavily from European Marxist traditions and global Leftist thinkers. It…

Media Hall of Shame Series: The Intercept

When The Intercept launched in 2014, it promised to be a radical departure from the establishment press. Born out of the Edward Snowden leaks and funded by a tech billionaire, it presented itself as the home for aggressive investigative journalism—fearless, adversarial, and independent of corporate or state influence. For a brief time, it lived up…

Media Hall of Shame Series – The Guardian UK

Once regarded as the genteel voice of British liberalism, The Guardian has in recent decades transformed into one of the most aggressively ideological media outlets in the English-speaking world. It has shed the cloak of classical liberalism and donned the armor of full-spectrum progressivism: anti-capitalist, anti-nationalist, secularist, globalist, and deeply antagonistic to traditional Western values—especially…

Media Hall of Shame Series: Podcast Save America

Pod Save America is a flagship podcast of Crooked Media, a company founded in 2017 by former Obama administration staffers: Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor. All three were top-level political operatives within President Obama’s communications team—Favreau as chief speechwriter, Lovett as a speechwriter, and Vietor as National Security Council spokesman. Together, they launched…

Media Hall of Shame Series: NowThis

NowThis is a digital media outlet that specializes in short-form video content targeting young, left-leaning social media users. Founded in 2012 by former Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer and former CNN executive Eric Hippeau, NowThis quickly gained traction for its mobile-first format and highly stylized, emotionally driven video news clips. Its hallmark is short, engaging…

Media Hall of Shame Series – Mother Jones

In the vast ecosystem of left-leaning media, Mother Jones stands out—not for balance or investigative rigor, but for its full-throated, unapologetic progressive activism. Founded in 1976 and named after the fiery union agitator Mary “Mother” Jones, the magazine was always intended to be a partisan outlet. And that’s exactly what it is: an ideological fortress…

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…

Media Hall of Shame Series: The Nation

The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, founded in 1865 in the aftermath of the Civil War. Originally conceived as a classical liberal outlet focused on civil discourse, The Nation has undergone a radical transformation over the decades. Today, it functions as one of the most ideologically left-wing publications…

Media Hall of Shame Series: Salon

Salon was founded in 1995 as one of the earliest digital-only news magazines, positioning itself as a progressive alternative to legacy print media. It gained prominence during the early 2000s with its acerbic tone, cultural commentary, and fierce opposition to the Bush administration. Over time, Salon cemented its place as a mouthpiece for hardline progressivism,…

Media Hall of Shame Series: Insider

Originally launched in 2007 as Business Insider, the outlet began with a focus on financial and tech news but has since expanded into a wide-ranging digital platform known simply as Insider. Under the leadership of co-founder Henry Blodget—a former Wall Street analyst banned from the securities industry for fraud—Insider quickly adopted a brash, attention-grabbing style…

Media Hall of Shame Series: Buzzfeed

Founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed began as a viral content experiment that combined listicles, quizzes, memes, and pop culture commentary with a growing appetite for “internet-native” news. Its early success was driven by shareable clickbait headlines and social media optimization rather than journalistic rigor. Over time, it attempted to evolve into a serious…

Media Hall of Shame Series: Quartz

Quartz, launched in 2012 as a business-centric digital publication, initially operated under the umbrella of Atlantic Media, a company historically aligned with center-left sensibilities. In 2018, Quartz was sold to Uzabase, a Japanese media and data firm, and then sold again in 2020 to Quartz’s co-founder and CEO, Zach Seward, who later sold it in…

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…

Media Hall of Shame Series: Daily Beast

The Daily Beast was founded in 2008 by Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, with financial backing from media conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp. IAC, chaired by Barry Diller (a longtime Hollywood and media powerbroker), has owned a wide array of digital properties including Match.com, Vimeo, Investopedia, and People Media. It also…