Why Does Pioneer Day Mark a Low Point in Religious Freedom in America?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is that religious freedom applies to all religions and even those people who have no religion. However, it has not always been applied equally.

On September 17, 1787, the U.S. Constitution was signed, and nine states ratified it by June 21, 1788, making it the law of the land. All thirteen states ratified the Constitution by May 29, 1790.

The Bill of Rights – meaning the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution – was written and proposed in 1789; it was ratified on December 15, 1791. The Bill of Rights was created to protect the individual rights of each American as well as to limit the power of the federal government.

Yet, the Mormon Pioneers were not protected when their religious freedom was threatened.

In fact, the Mormon Pioneers chose to leave the United States because they were persecuted for their religion.

Pioneer Day – July 24^th – is an annual commemoration of the day when the first pioneer wagons entered the Salt Lake Valley (Utah) on July 24, 1847. “Days of ‘47” is a huge celebration held in Utah annually.

Latter-day Saints are not the only people who have been persecuted for their religious beliefs, but early members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints endured their persecution righteously. The persecution began with Joseph Smith and increased as the Church of Jesus Christ grew. The Latter-day Saints were threatened, raped, murdered, suffered property damage, and more – first in Kirtland, Ohio (1831-1838) and in Missouri (1831-1839) and then in the Nauvoo, Illinois, area (1839-1847).

Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum Smith were assassinated at Carthage, Illinois, on June 27, 1844, and the main body of the Church fled to the Great Basin in 1846-1847. They understood that they had no religious freedom in the United States, so they went to the unsettled western area of North America searching for religious freedom and safety.

However, their safety was short lived.  After the Mexican-American War, the Great Basin area became part of the United States. Federal laws soon threatened religious beliefs as laws against the practice of plural marriage infringed on religious freedom.

Polygamous husbands and fathers were fined and imprisoned. To escape the law, many families went into hiding or again left the United States. Those who left created settlements in Mexico and Canada where they could continue to practice plural marriage.

The members who stayed in the Great Basin continued to be persecuted. Antipolygamy laws disincorporated the Church, allowing Church property to be confiscated.

With the temples being threatened and the work of eternity being stopped, President Wilford Woodruff took the matter to the Lord. Under inspiration from God, President Woodruff wrote and signed the 1890 manifesto that ended plural marriage. Anti-Mormon persecution declined but did not end. Persecution continues to this day by individuals and other religious organizations. However, the United States government has finally recognized that Latter-day Saints have religious freedom.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, from the days of Joseph Smith to the present day, fights for religious freedom for all people. Earlier this year, the First Presidency called for a Church-wide fast for religious freedom to be held on July 6, 2026. I was one of millions of members of the Church of Jesus Christ who fasted and prayed to thank God for religious liberty and to plead with God to protect religious freedom for all people.

 

 

How Can America Have Fair and Honest Elections?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday comes from President Donald Trump’s prime time address to the nation given on July 16, 2026, from the East Room of the White House: “No country can be great without fair and honest elections. You have to trust your country because if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness.” 

President Trump spoke on several topics and shared information that has recently been declassified. Among the most disturbing information of the evening was Trump’s statement that broadcast networks ABC and NBC chose not to air his speech live. He suggested that such networks should lose their licenses if they refuse to carry information from the President to the American people. 

According to Fred Lucas at The Daily Signal, Trump blamed the “deep state” for withholding information that should have been given to him during his first presidential term.

President Donald Trump announced the release of declassified documents he said are evidence that China has been meddling in U.S. elections by hacking into voter registration databases and by other means.

Trump, who spoke Thursday evening in a prime-time address to the nation, said the “deep state” had this information and suppressed it from the president and Congress.

“They kept it secret and hidden. Did not disclose to me or Congress,” Trump said.

Trump said the declassified information shows “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure….

The president said that China conducted a massive hacking of voter registration information. “The People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files,” Trump said.

[This would amount to almost all American adults because there are approximately 350 million Americans – adults, teens, and children.]

He said the information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other data.

“This data loss presents an unprecedented election, security nightmare,” the president added. At least a portion of the declassified information was released Thursday night.

The point of the hacking, according to Trump, as to steal information about thousands of voters. He also said information from 2018 and 2019 shows that Chinese operatives wanted to harm Trump so he would be forced to resign or be defeated in his reelection bid.

“The Chinese government wanted U.S. president to lose the next election and the reason they wanted me to lose is because they knew I was wise to them, charged them billions in tariffs, and built the largest military in the world,” Trump said.

Trump, who has long disputed his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, also said the FBI found China attempted to manufacture ballots in favor of Biden.

“Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden,” Trump said.

The president further said China paid U.S. journalists to write negative stories about him during his first term.

“The Chinese government sought to identify U.S. journalists who had reported negatively on the U.S. president and pay them large sums of money to write more negative articles about him, as many as they could, and they did not care what they said,” Trump asserted.

Trump said elections were “vulnerable and easily compromised and people within our government knew that.”

The Department of Homeland Security has information showing about 278,000 registered voters are foreigners, Trump said.

“According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections,” Trump said. “Since Democrat states refused to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that.”

The address comes as Trump is pushing Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require photo identification to vote and proof of citizenship to register to vote. The president, as he concluded his remarks, made a passionate plea for Congress to pass the legislation.

In March 2021, during the early months of the Biden administration, the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security issued a joint report that asserted China considered trying to influence the presidential election but backed off. It further said, “No evidence found that a foreign government manipulated any election results.”

Still, there have been documented cases of China election meddling and hacking.

In the 2024 campaign, FBI officials said Chinese government operatives targeted the phones of candidates, including now-President Trump, now-Vice President JD Vance, and individuals associated with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

A Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security report released in December 2023 found Chinese cyber actors collected publicly available voter information during the 2022 election.

In July 2024, the Justice Department Office of Inspector General issued a report that described China as one of several foreign governments that conducted malign influence campaigns directed at U.S. elections. This included using fake online personas and promoting propaganda.

For six years, Trump claimed that the election of 2020 was rigged. Now, the FBI and other intelligent agencies brought the receipts: Foreign nations influenced the election. What can Trump do to prevent future rigging of elections?

How Do We Protect Family and Church from the Currently Growing Culture?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns how to protect family and church from the negative influences in our culture. In his article “When the Culture’s View of Family Invades the Church,” Timothy Goeglein authored the following: 

The late James Q. Wilson, former professor of government at Harvard University, once said, “It is not money, but the family that is the foundation of public life. As it has become weaker, every structure built on that foundation has become weaker.”

Those words came to mind when I reviewed some sobering and disturbing statistics from Pew Research and others on the views of Christians when it comes to marriage and cohabitation – especially young Christians.

Prophets and apostles call the family the core unit of society. When families are strong, then the community and society are strong. When families fall apart, the community and society suffer.

It has been stated many times that the downfall of every great civilization, as well as institution, comes from within – not from aggressive external attacks but from moral compromises made along the way that slowly weaken its foundation.

As our society has debuckled itself from the institution of marriage, with catastrophic results, it seems now many churches are doing the same thing – choosing to conform to the culture rather than transforming it. As a result, the church’s voice in our culture becomes weaker – to the point of irrelevance – and our children are paying the price. This is evident in these statistics; especially when it comes to today’s young adults.

In 2019, Pew reported 58% of white evangelicals said cohabitation was acceptable as long as the couple eventually plans to marry.

Alarming as that statistic is, it is more sobering among young evangelicals. Nine years ago, a General Social Survey reported more than 40% of evangelicals between the ages of 20 and 29 thought cohabitation was acceptable even if they had no plans to marry.

In addition, a new survey from David Ayers at the Institute of Family Studies found nearly half of evangelical Protestants between the ages of 15 and 22 who are not presently cohabitating or married believe they will likely cohabit with a member of the opposite sex sometime in the future.

The study also found that 65% of evangelicals between the ages of 23 and 44 who had already cohabitated plan on doing so again. This not only impacts our church’s witness when it comes to marriage and family but also accelerates the continued fragmentation of the family unit – the stabilizing factor in all civilizations – regardless of faith.

Why has this happened? In the rush to be seen as “culturally relevant,” “tolerant,” and “nonjudgmental,” many Christians and churches have pushed aside the Biblical teachings regarding marriage and family. While it is commendable for churches to try to reach the unchurched, many have chosen to avoid so-called “hot topics” – especially when it comes to human sexuality – leaving a vacuum our culture is eager to fill.

A generation of young believers is learning more about sex and marriage from popular culture than from their churches. When the world – and not churches – is the main educator on these issues, these are the results.

Jim Daly, the president of Focus on the Family, has written, “It will be up to us to show a fraying culture that marriage is so much more than ‘just a piece of paper’ or an association of any two or more persons who profess to love each other. It is a sacred union of a man and a woman that confers myriad benefits on the spouses, their children, and society at large – benefits that cannot be replicated by any other relationship. I would go so far as to say a society cannot flourish, or even long survive, without stable marriages at its core.”

And I would add that when churches no longer view marriage as sacred, but just as another optional arrangement, churches themselves cannot flourish.

Why? Because when churches no longer treat marriage any differently than the culture – blindly accepting cohabitation as the “new normal” – they have lost their way – and their influence. They especially damage their credibility with rising generations of young Christians and other people of faith. Children still look to adults and institutions for guidance, and when those adults and institutions silently concede their rightful leadership, our children will do the same.

It is time for those of us who believe in the sanctity of marriage to no longer sit on the sidelines while our children learn about marriage from the Kardashians or “The Bachelor.” Instead, we must emphasize the beauty and sanctity of marriage; why it is spiritually, emotionally, and physically beneficial to not cohabit with someone of the opposite sex; and why waiting will be ultimately to their benefit.”

With this vision of marriage prioritized in our churches, we can once again not only have stable families but also a church possessing the moral authority to be a clear and convincing voice reestablishing a flourishing society and the dignity of love.

On September 23, 1995, President Gordon B. Hinckley introduced a proclamation titled “The Family: A Proclamation to the World” at the General Relief Society Meeting. The First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints authored the proclamation, which states the following: 

We, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, solemnly proclaim that marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of his children.

A few paragraphs later, the proclamation again taught the importance of marriage to God and explained the type of marriage that is acceptable to God.

The Family is ordained of God. Marriage between man and woman is essential to his eternal plan. Children are entitled to birth within the bonds of matrimony, and to be reared by a father and a mother who honor marital vows with complete fidelity. Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ….

The proclamation closes with a warning and an urgent call to action sounded to all individuals and governments.

We warn that individuals who violate covenants of chastity, who abuse spouse or offspring, or who fail to fulfill family responsibilities will one day stand accountable before God. Further, we warn that the disintegration of the family will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.

We call upon responsible citizens and officers of government everywhere to promote those measures designed to maintain and strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.

 

What Is the Difference Between Culture and Race?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is the value of knowing the difference between race and culture. America and Americans have welcomed legal immigrants from the beginning of the nation. Most, if not all, immigrants in the early years came from the same nations from which early American Colonists emigrated. Their cultures were similar. Their religions were similar.

Immigrants today come from every nation in the world, and many of them come with cultures that are far different from those that Americans value. Example: most Americans today believe that it is wrong for an adult to marry a child, yet there are immigrants who believe that it is okay. They come from a different culture. Rebecca Downs discussed culture and race in her article published at The Daily Signal. 

Although major sports wins bring celebration, the festivities are often marred in big cities by unruly behavior. That was particularly the case in New York, following the Knicks’ June 13 clinching of the NBA championship. The parade that followed brought more chaos.

Following the victory over the San Antonio Spurs – the Knicks’ first title in 53 years – hooligans took to the streets, vandalizing as they went, including targeting and torching a school bus. Those in the crowd cheered. Police, meanwhile, could not visibly be seen.

As he showed footage of the chaos during Friday’s episode of “The Tony Kinnett Cast” on the Daily Signal, host Tony Kinnett noted how those burning the school bus were both white and black. And the bus driver begging the crowd to stop was black. “The point of the story is that it is not about the race, it is all about the culture,” Kinnett observed.

The revelry of the parade was marred by random gunshots fired into the air to “just cause chaos and panic because that is the celebratory nature that has come out of some of these events,” as Kinnett mentioned.

Meanwhile, New York isn’t doing much to stop lawlessness. “There’s no condemnation of this from the city level. There’s nothing. [Mayor Zohran] Mamdani is busy running around patting himself on the back and p raising Islamic migrant stuff,” Kinnett said, also addressing how liberals excuse such behavior as how “it just happens.”

The New York Department of Sanitation unveiled commemorative garbage cans to celebrate the Knicks’ win. (They’re also available online for purchase.) Fans reacted by stealing them, dumping out trash onto the city sidewalk to do so. People could be heard cheering in the background.

During the parade, an individual appeared to be passed out from a drug overdose on the roof of a platform, as individuals sought to help. Kinnett observed that it took place with a “cop standing there, doing very little, ‘cause this is just normal behavior in New York.”

The passed-out man was revived using Narcan. He then proceeded to try to kiss the woman who gave him that Narcan.

This is a stunning juxtaposition with the amount of support the United States is getting from visitors from around the world who are here for the FIFA World Cup. These visitors, Kinnett said, “realize that everything they’ve been told by people like Keir Starmer about the United States, things that they’ve been told about by, for example, Zohran Mamdani, is a lie and that the United States is freaking incredible.”

Japanese guests receive particular attention for how respectful they’ve been, as they come to games ready with garbage bags to clean up trash afterward. For Kinnett, culture plays a significant role. “There are cultures that are objectively better than others because of how they carry themselves.”

A young Japanese woman picking up trash shared that it is part of their “culture,” but also a matter of respect, “respect for everything, respect for the players, supporters, and also for the stadium.” The young woman shared, “We are honored to be here, so we don’t want to make a mess and then leave it.”

What cultures do we want in America? Do we want more of the type of person who trashed a school bus in New York, or the Japanese who picked up their own mess? Americans must decide what type of cultures they want in America and then act to build those types of cultures. Whether they are imported, or whether they are born and reared in America, we are responsible for building the cultures that we desire. Races can live together if Americans develop the proper cultures in our nation.

Why Is Religious Freedom Essential for Peace?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday has to do with religious freedom and peace. According to President D. Todd Christofferson, Second Counselor in the First Presidency of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, religious freedom is “the cornerstone of peace in a world with many competing philosophies.”

President Christofferson and his wife, Kathy Christofferson, along with Elder Matthew S. Holland, General Authority Seventy, and his wife, Paige Holland, visited Philadelphia – the foundational hub of U.S. democracy. They toured historic sites in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, including the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, on Friday, June 12, 2026.

According to Sarah Jane Weaver, editor of the Deseret News, the Christoffersons and Hollands were joined by Elder Gary E. Stevenson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles and Elder Alexander Dushku of the Seventy as well as other leaders of faith at the Canterbury Medal Gala

on Thursday evening. The event is an annual gathering sponsored by Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a non-profit, public-interest legal and educational institute. 

President Christofferson offered the invocation at the Becket event, held as the United States celebrates the nation’s 250^th anniversary. Weaver reported as follows.

“Moral agency, the ability to choose right from wrong and to act for ourselves, is essential to God’s plan of salvation,” President Christofferson wrote on social media after the event.

“Religious freedom ensures that people can exercise their agency in matters of faith.

“We are grateful to be associated with so many wonderful people of faith who we stand with to advocate for religious freedom….

Reflecting on his time in Philadelphia, President Christofferson noted a key verse found in Latter-day Saint scripture, Doctrine and Covenants 101. It teaches that the Constitution was “established, and should be maintained for the rights and protection of all flesh.”

“[That means] all mankind, not just in this nation but everywhere in the world,” President Christofferson said. “I think it’s proven to be that wherever those principles have been adopted, the people have flourished and the blessings that we enjoy have been enjoyed by them.” …

Both President Christofferson and Elder Holland (who leads Latter-day Saint global communication efforts) praised Becket for defending and promoting religious liberty for all, according to the news release.

“I think about that Joseph Smith statement, that [he would] be willing to die for the rights of all different faiths – Catholic, Jews, Muslims. Not just our own,” Elder Holland said. “We see that with Becket. We’re willing to stand with others to defend their rights. And they’re willing to stand with us. There’s a power and a principle of equality and inclusiveness that we’re doing this in a multifaith way.”

President Christofferson said Becket is very effective. “They do a superb work. The key to their success is that they’re focused on religious liberty for everyone. Not just certain faiths, but all faiths and even those who have no faith. They are intent on ensuring that everyone has what the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights provides, and that is freedom of belief and religion and practice.”

Who Makes the Rules?

The liberty principle for this week concerns who makes the laws and who enforces the laws of the United States. This is a constitutional principle as well as one that affects freedom. All Americans should know this, but some do not – including those in Congress.

According to an article at The Daily Signal, Joseph Buff reported on a hearing in the Senate where senators interviewed Markwayne Mullin, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). 

A Senate Appropriations subcommittee interviewed department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin. During the hearing, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) accused Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and DHS of violating court orders. He charged, “Every day, this agency is breaking the law at scale and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars. The DHS does not implement the law any longer; it makes up the law.”

Murphy argued that the committee should not choose to fund agencies that allegedly break the law. “We swear an oath when we arrive here to ensure that their money is not used to fund unconstitutional or illegal behavior, the senator said. “Every single day, this agency is violating the Constitution and the law. This cannot continue.

Mullin was sworn into his office less than ninety days ago. He told the senators that he had an opening statement, but he used his time to fire back at Murphy’s attacks. He began by telling Murphy, “We’re doing the job that Congress gave us the authority to do. If you don’t like the laws, you can change them.”

“I do have an opening statement here, but wow. Senator Murphy, the outlandish claim you made there is just flat wrong,” Mullin said.

“What’s unconstitutional that we’re doing? We swore to uphold the Constitution just like you swore to uphold the Constitution,” the secretary added. “We’re simply enforcing the law. Period. Full stop.”

Mullin also accused Murphy of recklessly spreading dangerous rhetoric about DHS and ICE. “When you throw out reckless terms and you start referring to our agents as being dangerous, unconstitutional, and lawless, that’s why our agents’ death threats are up by 8,000%.”

“I know that’s not what you want, but your political theater, that’s what it causes. When you start looking at assaults on our officers, they’re up by 1,300%, Mullin said.

The secretary argued that the federal government needs to prioritize immigration enforcement and continue to fund ICE and U.S. customs and Border Protection.

“If you don’t want customs and Border Patrol, and their job is to control our borders and the customs entry points, then be honest with the American people and say “we want open borders,” but don’t sit there and accuse us of a bunch of stuff that you know isn’t true,” Mullin told Murphy.

 

 

 

Why Are Civic Skills and Constructive Arguments Essential for Freedom?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the importance of developing civic skills and practicing constructive arguments. There is a great division in the United States between liberals/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans. Some people have cut relationship strings, and most people in this group are liberal.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of polities at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute. He authored an article, published at Deseret News, and titled “Opinion: After 250 years, has America forgotten how to argue with itself? and subtitled “A country that cannot argue with itself is a country that has stopped governing itself.” 

A country that cannot argue with itself is a country that has stopped governing itself. As America approaches its 250^th birthday, the question that should hang over the celebrations is not whether we can throw a good party. It is whether we still know how to live together when the party is over.

The honest answer is that we are no longer sure. A generation now arrives at college unable to disagree without escalation and unable to draw on a shared body of knowledge that might make such exchanges worthwhile. They can speak, but they cannot really reason. They can express, but they cannot persuade. The Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, in its sober April report, conceded that universities have helped erode public trust of formation that did or did not happen long before. By 18, the habits are set. The college classroom is the place where the bill comes due, not the place where the work gets done.

That work is formation. A free society depends not merely on information but on formation: the slow apprenticeship by which a child becomes a citizen capable of inhabiting the republic she has inherited. This is the predictable result of decades of decisions that hollowed out that apprenticeship while pretending that something else – sentiment and self-expression – could carry the load. The diagnosis is finally widely shared. The harder news is that the cure requires two forms of formation at once, and we have been attempting one without the other for 30 years.

The civic skills the next generation is lacking.

The first thing we owe the next generation is the explicit cultivation of civic skills.

Disagreement, deliberation, listening, weighing evidence, changing one’s mind – these are not personality traits. They are skills, in exactly the same sense that addition and reading are skills. They have to be taught, practiced, modeled and reinforced, year over year, from the earliest grades. They corrode when replaced by therapeutic substitutes that treat every conflict as a wound to be soothed rather than a question to be reasoned through….

I have written about one K-12 school, the Birch Wathen Lenox School in Manhattan, that has stopped treating constructive dialogue as an assembly theme and started building it into a developmental arc: a year-by-year curriculum that walks children, beginning in the lower grades, through the actual mechanics of disagreement with trust, compassion and evidence.

The fast-growing network of classical charter schools across Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado and the Mountain West is doing related work from a different starting point: pairing rigorous instruction in the founding documents with a structured culture of recitation, argument and Socratic exchange. The two models look almost nothing alike. They are converging on the same insight: a citizen is formed, not born. The work belongs to childhood, not commencement.

I see the absence of this formation every term in my own classroom. Last semester, I asked a seminar of bright, motivated juniors to argue the strongest version of a position they personally rejected….

They had not been trained to argue. They had reached 21 without the apprenticeship that should have begun at 7….

The importance of constructive arguments.

The Jewish tradition I was raised in has a name for what these students had been deprived of: machloket l’shem shamayim, argument for the sake of Heaven – the Talmudic ideal in which Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Shammai disagree across generations because they share a sacred text and a discipline of reasoning.

Christian readers will recognize the same instinct in the medieval disputatio and in the line that runs from Augustine through Aquinas to the great pulpits of the American Founding. Lay traditions of communal teaching and self-governance – the ward council, the volunteer lesson refined among neighbors – carry that wisdom in a different idiom.

Communities of faith have long understood, even when secular institutions forget, that learning to argue well is itself a form of neighborliness and a discipline of humility before truth. They have understood that formation is not optional. It is what a community owes its young.

Tocqueville understood this in 1830s America. He admired Americans not because they agreed with one another – they did not – but because their associations, town meetings and churches had developed habits of mutual address that led argument function as the connective tissue of self-government. Those habits were formed in childhood, in congregations and one-room schoolhouses and family debate around the table, and they were carried into adult life as second nature. That tissue has thinned. It can be rebuilt, but only deliberately, and only in the years when human beings are actually being formed.

The importance of shared knowledge.

Yet civic skills alone are not enough, and this is where most of the current dialogue work falls short. You can run all the trainings, workshops and summits you want. If the participants do not share a baseline body of knowledge about the country they are arguing over – its founding documents, its religious and philosophical inheritances, its great books and great failures – the dialogue risks becoming more therapeutic than civic. It becomes an exchange of feelings about a country no one in the room actually knows. The conversation may be civil. It will not be civic.

This is the second form of formation we owe the next generation, and I have argued elsewhere that it is the precondition for everything else: a genuine inheritance, transmitted in K-12 and again in higher education. Not a checklist of requirements in which medieval political philosophy and contemporary television satisfy the same box. A real common foundation – basic historical literacy, the development of the American constitutional tradition, the religious and philosophical sources of Western civic life, the texts that shaped how the founders thought and how their critics still think. The point is not indoctrination. The point is exposure. The point is to admit the next generation into a conversation that began before them and will continue after them, so that they enter adult citizenship with something to argue from rather than only feelings to argue with.

When 10% of the room has read the Federalist and the rest have not, the room is not really having a debate about federalism. It is staging an asymmetry: Some students are arguing from a tradition, while others are left to argue from fragments. When students do not know what the Hebrew Bible, the Gospels, the classical tradition and the Enlightenment each contributed to the American settlement, they cannot tell the difference between a critique of the country and a caricature of it. A shared inheritance is what makes serious disagreement possible. Without it, you are not having a conversation. You are having a collision.

 

Which Is Best, Regular Time or Daylight Savings Time?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns time and the effects of daylight savings time. The time may come when we will no longer need to change our clocks twice each year. “Spring forward, fall back” may no longer be necessary. Moving to daylight saving time may have been an innovative idea at one time, but it may no longer be one.

According to Jennifer Galardi at The Daily Signal, few people enjoy the biannual shift in time. Most of us enjoy having longer daylight hours in the evening, but other people do not like to get up in the dark mornings. Her article contains other interesting tidbits previously unknown to me. 

It is this lack of consensus, as well as significant pushback from health experts, that has stalled the Sunshine Protection Act (HR 139) in the House Energy and commerce Committee since the beginning of 2025. The broader effort to pass similar versions of the bill has been ongoing since 2018.

Now, it looks as if the sun will rise again on an amendment to make DST permanent for all states, and without much notice.

The House Committee on Energy and Commerce late Tuesday night announced a markup meeting for Thursday, May 21, at 10 a.m. On the agenda was a proposal to fold the language of the Sunshine Protection Act into the Motor Vehicle Modernization Act (HR 7389).

This latest attempt would mandate permanent daylight saving time in all states that don’t self-exempt before its effective date, and it would prevent self-exemption after its effective date. The debate is not whether to stop changing the clocks every March and November. Most people, including members of Congress and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, despise the biannual switch. It’s which “version” of time to keep.

The issue doesn’t fall along traditional party lines. It’s not a Right or Left issue. It’s more of a “north vs. south” battle.

Both aforementioned politicians who want to “lock the clock” on daylight saving time are from states below the Mason-Dixon line, as are many of the supporters of the act. States such as Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama feel the warmth of the sun for more time every day in the winter months.

Although the disparity is flipped in the summer because of the Earth’s tilt, Northern states would really bear the brunt of permanent daylight savings time in winter, with the sun not rising in winter until 9 a.m. in some locations. That’s brutal for school-aged kids and anyone who does not have the luxury of sleeping in until the sun rises, and many Northern state legislatures, including Massachusetts, New York, and Alaska [news to me], oppose the change.

This is not merely a geographic issue – it is a fundamental tradeoff between public health and commercial interests.

Congress expanded daylight saving time in two phases: first in 1986, when it moved the start from late April to early April, and again in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which shifted the schedule in 2007 to run from the second Sunday in March through the first Sunday in November.

These decisions were not based on human health, grassroots demand, or even policy to save energy, as some claim. They were made as concessions to the candy and golf industries.

Both major extensions of daylight-saving time were driven by targeted lobbying. In the mid-1980s, a coalition of commercial interests – retail and Chamber of Commerce groups, outdoor recreation industries, and tourism businesses – pushed Congress to extend DST beginning earlier in April to make more money during the evening hours.

The 2005 expansion was heavily backed by the golf industry as well as retail and outdoor recreation groups. The National Confectioner’s Association also supported pushing the DST calendar past Halloween because its members stood to benefit from an extra hour of trick-or-treating – and candy consumption.

Politicians like Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., claim that it is “better for our physical and mental health” to have more sunshine in the later hours. This is consistently proven false by medical experts. In fact, the data points to the exact opposite.

Misalignment of clocks from the sun’s natural position in the sky has been estimated to decrease sleep duration by an average of 19 minutes every night throughout the duration of the DST observation, per a 2019 study. Such misalignment has been found to decrease productivity and earnings up to 4.5% per a 2015 study. Even worse, this misalignment has also been observed to increase fatal vehicular accidents significantly, by 21.8%, resulting in an average loss of $1.8 billion annually, per a 2022 study.

According to a position statement from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, permanent standard time should replace daylight savings time due to “evidence [that] supports the distinct benefits of standard time for health and safety, while also underscoring the potential harms that result from seasonal time changes to and from daylight savings time.”

Despite the testimony of experts, many in Congress have unabashedly claimed it is great for communities’ bottom line with “more business” to “boost the economy.” However, one study shows that worker productivity decreases during the transition to daylight saving time. Plus, the MAHA movement has made clear that sacrificing Americans’ health to boost consumption (particularly candy!) and line industry pockets is not a tradeoff politicians should make…..

The push to standardize what is not standard – or healthy – is a mistake, particularly for certain geographic areas that will suffer the most. Public policy should reflect the natural order – not manipulate it for profit.

Did you learn something new about time and time changes? I did. Before reading this article, I thought that permanent Daylight Savings Time would be great. Now, I lean toward full-time natural time.

 

What Is the New Candidate Law in Georgia?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the value that all candidates for office must receive equal treatment. The State of Georgia is upholding that value even though Democrats are upset about it. Joseph MacKinnon at The Blaze wrote the following about Georgia. 

Democrats are enraged over the prospect of DA candidates having to do more than brandish their party affiliation to win over voters.

Fani Willis, the Democrat district attorney in Fulton County who tried and failed to throw President Donald Trump in prison, has found a new reason to rage publicly, level groundless accusation of racism, and masquerade as a victim of opposing forces.

To the chagrin of those Democrat officials and other race hustlers who demanded its veto, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) ratified legislation on Tuesday requiring nonpartisan elections for certain offices in the Peach State’s five most populous counties – Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Cobb, and Clayton – effective Jan. 1, 2028.

It’s supposedly ‘racist’ because the five district attorneys … are black female Democrats. Candidates running to become or remain county governing authorities, tax commissioners, superior court clerks, and solicitor-generals must run in nonpartisan elections. County sheriffs are exempt.

Under the law, district attorney candidates will no longer “be nominated by a political party or by a petition as a candidate of a political body or as an independent candidate.” They will also forgo a nonpartisan primary, competing only in the general election.

Why Do We Celebrate National Day of Prayer?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is to worship the God of this land, even Jesus Christ. Today is the 75^th National Day of Prayer – which President Ronald Reagan signed into law in 1988. 

Today Congress celebrated in the U.S. Capitol in celebration of America’s 250 years of liberty as well as “all that God has blessed her with.” Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner opened the celebration, according to Virginia Grace McKinnon at The Daily Signal.

“Our Founders did their best to set up our nation in accordance with his guidelines and principles. And my friends, that is why God has blessed America for 250 years,” Johnson told the crowd gathered in Statuary Hall. “He is the one that has endowed us with our inalienable rights, among those of the rights of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”

The theme of this year’s National Day of Prayer comes from 1 Chronicles 16:24, “Declare His glory among the nations, His marvelous works among all the people.”

“The theme of this year’s National Day of Prayer is not rhetorical,” Johnson continued. “God calls us to be faithful and to proclaim his good deeds and on this anniversary, particularly, we have a great opportunity.”

“We should use the entire year as a teachable moment to pass along to the next generation of Americans, who we are, what we’re about, and why we are in this great country,” Johnson suggested.

The speaker offered a prayer over the crowd: “Let’s also pray that we may have the strength, just as our founders did, to hand the faith and freedom on to the next generation that follows us, a generation that cherishes liberty and proclaims proudly what is right and good and true.”

HUD Secretary Scott Turner [is]a former NFL player [who] also served as an associate pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas. He shared the glory of God through his own personal testimony.

“I still remember being a little boy sitting and feeling and sensing the presence of God Almighty. Jeremiah 29:11 says, ‘He knows the plans that He has for us, plans to prosper us and not to harm us, plans to give us hope and a future.’”

“I know that that same Providence has washed over the United States of America for the past 250 years,” the secretary said.

“Look at how many storms God has led us over the last two and a half centuries,” he continued. “We survived and thrived despite all these trials, because of the grace of our sovereign God and the same sovereign God that our founding fathers believed in.”

“No people can be bound to acknowledge and adore the invisible hand which conducts the affairs of men more than the people of the United States,” he said, referencing George Washington’s inaugural address. “Every step by which they have advanced to the character of an independent nation seems to have been distinguished by some token of providential agents.”

What Should Be Done with Trump?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is that sometimes war is necessary to bring about peace and prosperity. Hitler and his armies killed millions of Jews before World War II stopped them, and he is just one example of one person seeking more power by taking it from other people.

If Iran were close to having nuclear power and missiles powerful enough to reach the United States, no one doubts that they would use that power and those missiles to render “Death to America,” as they so often shout.

Up until the present conflict, American presidents have just shrugged their shoulders and tried to appease the power-hungry Iranians – and thus kicked the can down the road. Iran probably thought that Donald Trump would continue the same way. Even some Americans thought that he would. Keith Koffler at The Daily Signal says that no one should be surprised with what Trump says and does.

One of the most stunning and yet tediously repetitive features of America’s Donald Trump Experience is the expectation that President Donald Trump is going to become someone else. People across the political spectrum seem permanently immune to the realization that the country has elected a man who says and does extraordinarily shocking things. With metronomic consistency, they exclaim, “Can you believe what he said? He’s just completely nuts! Where’s my 25^th Amendment?”

And then, everyone recovers, reverts to their prevailing view of Trump, and buckles up for the next outrage, which lands with no less unjustifiable surprise.

But it seems Trump may have gone just a bit too far, even for conservatives, with his most recent aggravations of the natural order. Their odiousness, along with the alleged rancid smell of the Iran war, is causing a slow slinking away from a president they perceive as gone stinky.

[Koffler named several “odious” words and actions: (1) the AI image of himself as Jesus healing the sick, (2) Trump saying Pope Leo XIV is “WEAK on Crime” and “terrible for Foreign Policy” before telling him to “get his act together, and (3) Trump saying “a whole civilization might die tonight” rather than “threatening to bomb Iran.”]

None of this is great. People have a right to be offended. But they should consider a few things before withdrawing support for Trump.

Conservatives during the presidential primaries in 2016 ceded some of the moral high ground they felt they always held by choosing Trump, a great but imperfect man.

They had a choice closer to moral perfection in Jeb Bush, but they concluded, correctly, that these harrowing times demanded something else. America’s self-destruction seemed too near for a conventional candidate. It was time to get a little rude and go on offense.

We got what we asked for. Over the course of two terms, Trump has altered the course of U.S history, diverting and even reversing leftist agendas that seemed hopelessly unstoppable.

·       He revamped the Supreme Court, resulting in myriad decisions favorable to conservatives, most prominently the demolition of Roe v. Wade, something long thought a lost cause.

·       He completely plugged up the massive hole in the border – which presupposes that there still was a border – ending the ceaseless waves of illegal immigration into the U.S. that threatened to swamp our culture with something else.

·       He changed the entire conversation on “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” polite terms for dropping our Judeo-Christian culture into the Memory Hole and replacing it with a Marxian, totalitarian dictatorship commanding obedience to dissolute collectivism and relativism. In high schools, college, and the workplace, woke equity is now on the defensive.

·       He defeated the Islamic State caliphate, and he dawned a new age of Arab-Israeli cooperation with the unprecedented Abraham Accords.

·       He withdrew from the Paris climate accords and refocused the country back toward fossil fuels, ensuring Americans’ pockets wouldn’t be picked by European internationalists while China cheerfully burned through its coal.

These are pivotal realignments that eclipse ephemeral measures such as a point added or subtracted to gross domestic products or an increase or decrease in the crime rate, as important as those things are.

I would personally add ending—or at least vastly delaying – Iran’s nuclear ambitions to the list, but that’s exactly what some conservatives don’t agree with. And that’s the point. It’s a disagreement. An argument. Not grounds for divorce….

To repeat, we got what we asked for: Trump.

Let’s also remember that much of the outrage Trump mobilizes is pure Madison Avenue, designed preponderantly for effect, manufactured in the vast PR-generating region of his frontal lobe. He’s selling – propaganda for friends, deception for enemies.

Unlike many other presidents, he’s arm to actual human beings whom he has no political use for. He says hello to the janitor. His exaggerations and insults can be unpleasant and outrageous, but there’s a humanity and even an honesty within them.

He does things I don’t like. But he’s prevented many worse things I don’t like.

Trump is a towering figure who will be written about for centuries. Sometimes that indecorous tower – excessively embroidered with Trump gold – reflects sunlight. Sometimes it casts very dark shadows. It sways a bit with the wind, but in the end, it has stood for conservative values more resolutely than any of the smaller edifices, easier on the eye and ear.

We conservatives made our bargain with Trump long ago. Let’s own it.

 

 

 

Why Is America Destroying Iran?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns the principle to “Know Your Enemy.” This principle involves discernment, which helps us to see past the smiles that do not reach the eyes and the agreeing words. It means more than “Trust but Verify.” It means to truly know your enemy: know the culture, know the national history, know the personal history, and know the patterns and records.

The United States has a pattern of being split down the middle on whether the US should be fighting a war in Iran. One half remembers the history of the past 47 years, and the other half does not. Being a child in 1979 or being born after that date is not an excuse. Here is information that all Americans should understand. This division emboldens our enemies.

Suzanne Downing produces a daily newsletter for Alaskans titled the “Alaska Story – where the conversation happens.” In a recent newsletter, she recounted the history of the US-Iran issue and stated that Iran hopes that Americans do not have a long memory about the terrorist regime. 

The trouble with public memory is that it resets itself every few years when a new crisis arrives, a new slogan takes over the airwaves, a new generation of commentators discovers the same old regime and speaks about it as though history began last Tuesday.

Iran benefits from that amnesia. The clerical regime in Tehran has spent decades cultivating proxies, arming terror networks, directing covert attacks, and leaving behind a trail of dead Americans, dead Jews, dead dissidents, and dead civilians across multiple continents.

Yet every so often, the conversation circles back to whether Iran can be trusted, whether it only wants security, whether the West has somehow misunderstood its intentions. The record says otherwise.

For at least three decades, Iran has been identified by the United States as the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism. It reflects a long pattern tied to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its Quds Force, which have financed, trained, armed, and directed groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Shiite militias in Iraq, and the Houthis. Tehran prefers the language of “resistance.” The graves of Americans tell a more truthful story….

A partial list of Iran-sponsored terrorism, as provided by the State Department [follows]:

·       November 1979: Iranian students, backed by the regime, seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran -- taking 66 Americans hostage in a 444-day standoff.

·       April 1983: The Islamic Jihad, an Iran-backed terrorist group, carried out a suicide car bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 17 Americans.

·       October 1983: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed 241 U.S. military personnel – including 220 U.S. Marines and 21 other service personnel – in a truck bombing at a Marine compound in Beirut.

·       March 1984: Iran-backed Islamic Jihad terrorists kidnapped CIA station chief William Buckley on his way to work in Beirut, ultimately killing him the following year.

·       September 1984: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed 23 innocent people – including two American service members – in a car bomb attack at the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut.

·       December 1984: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists hijacked Kuwait Airways Flight 221 enroute to Pakistan, diverting it to Tehran—where they brutally tortured and killed two American officials.

·       June 1985: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist hijacked TWA Flight 847 on its way from Athens to Rome, torturing a U.S. Navy diver before shooting him point blank in the head and tossing his body onto the Beirut airport tarmac.

·       July 1989: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed U.S. Marine Col. William Higgins after kidnapping him the previous year while serving with a United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon.

·       April 1995: Iran-backed Islamic Jihad terrorists killed eight people – including one American citizen – in a car bomb attack in the Gaza Strip.

·       August 1995: An Iran-backed Hamas suicide bomber blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing an American and three other passengers, and wounding more than 100 others.

·       February 1996: An Iran-backed Hamas suicide bomber blew up another bus in Jerusalem, killing three Americans and wounding three other Americans.

·       March 1996: A suicide bomber linked to the Iran-backed Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist groups killed 20 people – including two Americans – in a suicide bombing at a Tel Aviv shopping center.

·       May 1996: Iran-backed terrorists killed an American-Israeli dual citizen and wounded another American citizen in the West Bank.

·       June 1996: Iran-backed Hezbollah Al-Hijaz terrorists killed 19 U.S. Airmen and wounded nearly 500 others in a truck bombing at a U.S. Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia.

·       September 1997: Iran-backed Hamas suicide bombers blew themselves up at a shopping mall in Jerusalem, killing an American-Israel dual citizen and wounding seven other American citizens.

·       August 1998: Al-Qaeda suicide bombers, facilitated by Iran-backed Hezbollah, simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224 people – including a dozen American citizens.

·       August 2001: An Iran-backed Hamas terrorist blew up a Jerusalem pizzeria, killing three Americans.

·       January 2002: An Iran-backed al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade terrorist killed an American-Israeli dual citizen in the West Bank.

·       July 2002: An Iran-backed Hamas terrorist killed five Americans in a bombing at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

·       June 2003: An Iran-backed Hamas suicide bomber killed 17 people – including an American citizen – on a bus in Jerusalem.

·       August 2003: An Iran-backed Hamas terrorist blew up a bus in Jerusalem, killing five Americans and wounding one other American.

·       October 2003: Iran-backed Popular Resistance Committees terrorists killed three U.S. diplomatic personnel in a bombing in Gaza.

·       Between 2003 and 2011: Iran-backed militias killed at least 603 U.S. troops in Iraq – “roughly one in every six American combat fatalities in Iraq.”

·       August 2006: Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorists killed American citizen and Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldier Michael Levin during the Second Lebanon War – the only American to die in the conflict.

·       January 2007: A dozen men affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force killed five U.S. soldiers and wounded three others in Karbala, Iraq, after disguising themselves as U.S. soldiers and entering the Provincial Joint Coordination Center.

·       March 2007: Former FBI Agent Robert Levinson disappeared in Iran, likely dying in an Iranian prison.

·       July 2014: Iran-backed Hamas terrorists killed two American citizens serving in the IDF.

·       October 2015: Iran-backed Hamas terrorists killed an American citizen and his wife in a drive-by shooting in the West Bank.

·       December 2019: Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah terrorists killed an American civilian contractor and wounded several U.S. service members in a rocket attack at K1 Air Base in Kirkuk, Iraq.

·       January 2020: 109 U.S. troops suffered traumatic brain injuries in an Iranian ballistic missile attack on the Ain al-Asad airbase in Iraq.

·       September 2020: U.S. intelligence indicated the Iranian regime was considering a plot to assassinate the U.S. Ambassador to South Africa.

·       February 2021: An Iran-backed militia fired a rocket at coalition forces in Erbil, Iraq, wounding a U.S. service member and four U.S. civilian contractors.

·       July 2021: Iranian-backed militias wounded two U.S. service members in a series of rocket and drone attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq and Syria.

·       September 2022: An Iranian rocket attack killed an American citizen in Iraqi Kurdistan.

·       November 2022: An IRGC captain orchestrated the killing of an American citizen in Baghdad.

·       March 2023: An Iranian drone attack killed an American contractor and wounded five U.S. service members and another contractor in a strike on a coalition base in Syria.

·       October 2023: Iran-backed Hamas terrorists killed 46 Americans and kidnapped at least 12 Americans in the October 7^th massacre.

·       December 2023: Iran-backed militias wounded three U.S. service members in an attack on Erbil Air Base in Iraq.

·       January 2024: Iran-backed Kataib Hezbollah terrorists killed three U.S. service members and wounded more than 40 other service members in a drone attack against the Tower 22 military base in Jordan.

·       Between October 2023 and November 2024: Iran and its proxies conducted more than 180 attacks against U.S. forces in the Middle East, wounding more than 180 U.S. service members and killing three service members.

·       November 2024: An Iranian national and IRGC asset was charged for plotting to assassinate President Trump.

·       June 2025: Iran-backed militias attacked at least three U.S. bases in Syria and two U.S. bases in Iraq.

As one can see from this “partial list of Iran-sponsored terrorism,” Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979 when the regime first took Americans hostage. Since then, Iran-backed militias killed at least 996 Americans (plus hundreds of other people) and wounded hundreds of Americans (plus other people). Iran wants “Death to America” and has killed hundreds of Americans. It is past time that the United States fought back against an enemy that has been at war with us for 47 years! I am grateful that we have a President willing to take the war to Iran before they get a nuclear weapon!