Editorially, the Wall Street Journal recently declared that: “An old political poison is growing on the new right, led by podcasters and internet opportunists who are preoccupied with the Jews. It is spreading wider and faster than we thought, and it has even found an apologist in Kevin Roberts, president of the venerable Heritage Foundation.” The cause of this recent furor is Nick Fuentes.

When did the national day of Thanksgiving begin in the United States? After the United States had completed its Constitution in 1787 and the new Congress was in session, the Congress proposed that the Bill of Rights be added to the Constitution as the first 10 amendments. (The Bill of Rights was one of the conditions for ratification of the Constitution). Representative Elias Boudinot of New Jersey and Connecticut Congressman Roger Sherman proposed that President Washington declare a national day of Thanksgiving, with “one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many blessings He had poured down upon them.” So, on 26 November 1789, Washington declared the first national day of Thanksgiving.

What has happened to American civilization? Shared moral values used to define the uniqueness of America (e.g., virtue, a sense of community and compassion). Columnist David Brooks provides a framework for understanding the enormous shift away from these shared values that has occurred within America over the last 50 years or so

The Founders of this nation argued that democracy could survive only if citizens could restrain “their passions, be obedient to a shared moral order and point their lives toward virtue. They relied on religious institutions to do that moral formation. As John Adams put it, ‘Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.’” Indeed, Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s concluded that “For the Americans, the idea of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of one without the other.”

In August 2025, a reporter asked President Trump about ending Russia’s war on Ukraine. He responded: “I want to end it,” he said. “I want to try and get to heaven if possible. I’m hearing I’m not doing well. I am really at the bottom of the totem pole. But if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons.” His campaign’s political action committee then followed up with an appeal to his supporters to help him get into heaven by giving money.

It has been several weeks since Turning Point USA founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated on 10 September 2025 on the campus of Utah Valley University. Much has happened since then, including a memorial service for him in Arizona. I have been thinking about and reflecting upon this momentous event.

Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) was an American financier and convicted sex offender who was accused of serial sex trafficking of women and girls. Along with his convicted confederate, Ghislaine Maxwell, he systematically groomed and sexually abused (and enabled the sexual abuse of) hundreds and hundreds of young women and girls. Through his successful financial career, Epstein became a multimillionaire and developed a social circle that included extremely wealthy individuals, prominent politicians, and even royalty. While jailed and awaiting a federal sex-trafficking trial, Epstein killed himself by hanging.

On the last day of its term, in the case of Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, by a 6-to-3 vote the US Supreme Court delivered a decisive ruling against one of the worst industries in America. It upheld a Texas law that requires pornographic websites to “use reasonable age verification methods” to make sure that their customers are at least 18 years old. The court split on ideological lines, with the six Republican appointees voting to uphold the law and the three Democratic appointees in dissent.

Planned Parenthood was founded in 1916 as a grassroots movement to provide family planning to poor women. The trouble for Planned Parenthood in 2025 stems from its dual and often dueling roles as both a national advocacy organization and a local healthcare provider, one inherently political and the other necessarily nonpartisan. [More about that later in this essay.] Planned Parenthood is actually 48 independently incorporated affiliates operating under the national organization’s umbrella.

During one of my trips to Europe in 2005, I visited the St. Nicholas Church in Leipzig, Germany. I wanted to visit this church because in 1982 the pastor of that church, Christian Fuhrer, began Monday prayer meetings to pray for peace amid global violence and the oppressive East German regime. At first, the number attending these prayer meetings was small but attendance began to swell and spilled over to mass meetings outside the church gates.