Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson

Penna Dexter
A presidential transition always involves firing federal bureaucrats that populated the previous administration. The Trump team entered office motivated and prepared for this work — and rightly so.
The Napolitan Institute, an organization founded by pollster Scott Rasmussen, recently released a poll of Washington DC-based federal bureaucrats. Sixty-four percent of those who voted for Kamala Harris for president said they would not follow a lawful order from President Trump if they disagreed with it. Forty-two percent of federal government managers,with annual salaries of $75,000 or more, said they plan to politically oppose the administration.”
Senator Rand Paul told The Daily Signal that any government employee who refuses a lawful order by the president “should be fired for cause — immediately.”
The trouble is that there are career bureaucrats — often lifelong federal employees —who are protected from termination because they are not classified as policy-making executive branch employees.
Some of these employees do influence policy.
During his first term, President Trump experienced intense opposition from certain progressive bureaucrats. So, he issued an executive order creating a new category of federal employee: “Schedule F.” These are previously-protected employees whose jobs do entail making certain decisions that impact policy. Under the Trump order, these employees would no longer be shielded from termination for “perceived disloyalty to the president and his agenda.” The rule stipulates that “the President have appropriate management oversight regarding this select cadre of professionals.”
President Biden repealed the Trump order upon entering office. And, he implemented a rule that prevents the firing of career civil servants,
Federal employees that have “policy-making and policy-influencing roles” can form part of the deep state that plagues incoming presidents when they try to implement conservative policies. That’s why President Trump is restoring Schedule F.
Congress should now consider enshrining it into Federal law.
As Senator Katie Britt of Alabama put it,  “Civil servants must serve our nation, not their political party.”

Kerby Anderson
Should parents be allowed to opt their children out of readings of LGBTQ-themed storybooks? This is the question before the Supreme Court. The case comes from Maryland, where a coalition of parents from Montgomery County contend that requiring their children to participate in instruction that violates their religious beliefs violates their First Amendment right to freely exercise their religion.
Activists have been working for decades to promote gay and lesbian views to young children in the public school system. Some of these materials have the obvious goal of indoctrinating students into this ideology. That is why the Becket Fund is representing families of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths in this case.
Eric Baxter (Becket) explained, “Cramming down controversial gender ideology on three-year-olds without their parents’ permission is an affront to our nation’s traditions, parental rights, and basic human decency.” He argued, “The court must make clear: parents, not the state, should be the ones deciding how and when to introduce their children to sensitive issues about gender and sexuality.”
This case, once again, puts the high court in the center of the culture wars. The justices earlier heard oral arguments in a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on transgender surgery for minors.
Critics argue that the Supreme Court should stay out of the culture wars. My response is that they would be more than glad to avoid such cases, if it weren’t for activists trying to inject their gay and transexual ideologies into grade school classrooms.
We can hope and pray that the Supreme Court will prevent these attempts to indoctrinate young minds and allow parents to raise their children without such interference. The justices need to bring some common sense back into the public schools of America.

Kerby Anderson
It didn’t take long before the media launched what John Nolte referred to as the Hoax Machine. He was referring to the way many in the media portrayed Elon Musk’s arm movement as a Nazi salute.
But later in his article, he provided a hoax list that included nearly 40 examples promoted by the mainstream media. Each hoax on the list has a link so you can check it out for yourself.
Many of them were about false claims about Donald Trump. A few examples are the “Very Fine People Hoax” and “Trump Trashes Troops Hoax.” Each of those have been debunked by knowledgeable people who were present at the time. Of course, we cannot forget many others associated with Trump’s first term, like the “Russia Collusion Hoax”
The pandemic brought many hoaxes. A few examples were the “COVID Lab Leak Theory is Racist Hoax” and “COVID Deaths are Overcounted is a Conspiracy Theory Hoax.”
Many hoaxes involved media correspondents rushing to false conclusions or repeating false allegations. A few examples were the “Covington KKKids Hoax” and the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot Hoax.”
And there was the prominent hoax involving Jussie Smollett. Of course, his hoax gained national attention because of who he was and what he claimed happened to him. In previous commentaries, I have listed, on a regular basis, the increasing number of fake hate crimes that misrepresent how Americans treat each other and waste law enforcement’s time and money investigating them.
The lesson here is to be skeptical and discerning when you hear or read something reported in the news or repeated on social media. The story, and the subsequent claims, may merely be another hoax.

Kerby Anderson
As I mentioned a week ago, President Joe Biden warned of the rise of oligarchs in one of his farewell speeches before leaving office. Apparently, the issue of oligarchs and Big Tech leaders is a theme that some in Congress plan to use this year.
Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Michael Bennet sent a letter to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. They criticized him for contributing to President Donald Trump’s inauguration fund. The Senators reminded him that, “Big Tech companies have come under increased scrutiny from federal regulators.” They expressed to him their concern “that your company and other Big Tech donors are using your massive contributions to the inaugural fund to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration.”
Sam Altman was quick to reply on X, “Funny, they never sent me one of these for contributing to Democrats.” He went on to explain that his “was a personal contribution as you state,” which is why he was “confused about the questions given that my company did not make a decision.”
Both points are relevant. He didn’t remember that any of his contributions to Joe Biden or Kamala Harris triggered such a letter. In fact, the editors of The Wall Street Journal reminded us that President Biden’s 2020 inaugural brought in $62 million. And the presidential campaign for Kamala Harris raised over $1 billion.
Second, he was making a personal contribution to the inauguration, and it had nothing to do with his company. Of course, the senators knew that but wanted to bully a Big Tech leader who has changed some of his giving habits.
When most of Big Tech lined up behind democrats, the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress were thrilled. Now that some are reconsidering their previous support, they are likely to get similar letters.

Kerby Anderson
What are the three hardest words in the English language? Perhaps you have heard that the three hardest words to say in the English language are: I love you. I have also heard some say that the three hardest words are: I was wrong.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner devote a chapter to this question in one of their books. They argue that the three hardest words are: I don’t know. They lament that this is the case because it is impossible to learn everything.
Apparently, our inability to say we don’t know starts at an early age. There is the classic study of British schoolchildren who were given a story and then asked four questions about the story. Two of the questions were unanswerable. There wasn’t any information given in the story. Nevertheless, three-fourths (76%) of the students answered these questions anyway.
It becomes ever more difficult to say you don’t know as you get older. Children expect their parents to know everything, at least until they get to be teenagers. Then their parents are considered very stupid.
Government leaders and recognized experts are not expected to say they don’t know. And we have lived through a pandemic and then a political season where many of our leaders should have merely said: I don’t know.
Instead, they were confident about the value of masks and vaccines. They were confident that inflation was under control. They were confident about their proposed solutions to everything from rising crime rates to rising global temperatures.
Often these were merely opinions. As Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, “Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not to their own facts.”
That is why we need some skepticism and biblical discernment, especially when the so-called experts make such confident statements and predictions. Sometimes the best answer is merely: I don’t know.

Kerby Anderson
The term “equity” has caused great confusion, perhaps because many social justice warriors intend it to be ambiguous. Sometimes I have been told by my fellow Christians to stop criticizing DEI and equity because Christians should be for equality. Of course, that is not how the term is used.
We began to see its meaning during the pandemic. Noah Rothman reminds us that some public health experts talked about the notion of “grounding” vaccination access “in equity.” What that meant was to provide vaccinations first to the disadvantaged along with providing it to public servants.
Further back in line would be white people, which would include the elderly, who were at the greatest risk. According to one University of Pennsylvania ethicist, that was fine. “Older populations are whiter” because society “enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
The wildfires in Southern California provided another example. One newspaper editorial criticized the fact that some wealthy residents were able to hire their own firefighters but complained they didn’t suffer the same consequence of others. The real problem was the shortage of fire fighters, water, and common-sense fire management.
Heather Mac Donald addresses the use and misuse of equity in her book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives. The subtitle of her book might seem like hyperbole until you dig into some of the stories she tells. The word equity shows up in science, medicine, music, and the criminal justice system.
We have seen this dangerous drift to equity. It is time for it to end.

Penna Dexter
As evidenced by the crowd at last weeks’ March for Life on the National Mall in Washington DC, the pro-life movement is alive and well. In a post-Roe world, it’s still needed.
Vice President J.D. Vance joined the marchers, thanking them for showing up in such large numbers on “this especially frigid January.”  He made it clear he’s one of them, and  described their cause as “our movement.”
In a video message, President Trump pledged that in his second term, he will “protect the historic gains” made in his previous administration and will block the “push for a federal right to unlimited abortion on demand.”
Both the president and vice president made clear that targeting of “Americans of faith” and pro-lifers by the U.S. Justice Department will end.
President Trump told the marchers, “I am releasing the Christians and pro-life activists who were persecuted by the Biden regime for praying and living out their faith…”
Vice President Vance referred to failures by our nation to foster a culture of life, stating “our country has not stepped up in the way you have.”
Sadly, his statement aptly describes a recent action by the United States Senate.
Every January, before the March for Life, Congress considers an important piece of pro-life legislation. This year’s bill was the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, introduced by Senators James Lankford (R-OK) and Jim Banks (R-IN).
 On January 9th, the new Senate Majority Leader, John Thune, (R-SD) held a vote on it.
The bill does nothing to limit access to abortion. It simply requires that babies who are born alive—having survived an attempted abortion—will receive appropriate medical care. It’s a simple argument: Leaving this baby to die would be infanticide.
The motion for cloture failed 52-47, with every Democrat voting against moving the bill forward.
This extremism helped give us a Vice President who marched for life, carrying a sign that reads, “I Am the Pro-life Generation.”

Kerby Anderson
Here is a social statistic that should concern all Americans, and deserves attention from leaders in government, pastors in churches, and parents in the home. Young men are falling further behind. That is the title of a Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Wolfe.
“More women ages 25 to 34 have entered the workforce in recent years than ever. The share of young men in the labor market, meanwhile, hasn’t grown in a decade.” Place her statistics with another that I cited just a few months ago. America has 7 million young men (ages 25-54) who are not working and not looking for work.
One reason is attitude. Richard Reeves (president of American Institute for Boys and Men) explains, “The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are needed or that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society.”
This leads to the phenomenon known as a failure to launch. “In Spanish, parents call it encaminado: making sure your children are on the path to an independent adulthood.” One in three young adults live with their parents. And young men are more likely to live with their parents than young women. Former Senator Ben Sasse wrote about this in his book, The Vanishing Adult: Our Coming-of-Age Crisis and How to Rebuild a Culture of Self-Reliance.
Steven Malanga argues in his essay Unemployable that “a growing number of Americans aren’t simply out of a job. There are no longer fit for work.” Many young men do not have a good work ethic and haven’t been prepared by the schools for the labor market.
The crisis of young men in America deserves our attention. Government leaders and church leaders need to take note.

Kerby Anderson
Senator Rand Paul was on a TV interview with Larry Kudlow to talk about government spending. They began by acknowledging that we have a national debt of $36 trillion and a fiscal budget that needs to be brought under control.
Senator Paul believes the best benchmark is to only spend what comes into the federal treasury, but that hasn’t happened in decades. But he suggested that the first place to start would be to cut the hundreds of thousands of dollars allocated to study whether lonely rats use more cocaine than well-adjusted socialized rats. Or Senator Paul suggested we might cut the money allocated to study whether Japanese quail on cocaine are more sexually promiscuous. With a bit of sarcasm, he suggested there are a “few things we might be able to cut.”
Of course, these aren’t large cuts, which is why Larry Kudlow wanted to know if it were possible to save the money by not spending funds allocated but never used for COVID, or the Inflation Reduction Act, or even the CHIPS bill.
Senator Paul responded that there is a way to do this. It’s called recission. It was tried once in the Trump administration to send back $15 billion in unspent funds, but there were two Republicans who did not vote for it. He is convinced that perhaps now you could get 50 Republicans to vote for recission and cut $500 billion.
The other idea they discussed was impounding funds, but the Supreme Court ruled against President Nixon doing that. This current court might be willing to consider that process of impounding funds since it was done for more than a hundred years until the court ruled against Nixon in 1975.
There are ways to cut federal spending.

Kerby Anderson
In his last two presidential addresses, Joe Biden warned of the rise of oligarchs and the development of a tech-industrial complex. He reminded the nation of the farewell address of President Eisenhower, who spoke of a military industrial complex.
Noah Rothman observed that Democrats invented this “new bogeyman” only when some billionaires and Big Tech titans started to “support Republican politicians and their policy preferences.” He reminds us that Democrat leaders weren’t “all that vexed by ‘misinformation and disinformation’ when they were the ones improperly wielding the coercive power of the state.”
Victor Davis Hanson concluded that Biden’s attempt to copycat the warnings of Eisenhower failed because “to paraphrase a famous quip from 1988 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen, ‘President Biden, you’re no Dwight Eisenhower.’”
He also reminds us that “until November 2024, Biden had no problems with oligarchs. In fact, he courted and used them. And they, in turn, eagerly donated lavishly to his agenda.” Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did the bidding of the Biden campaign team in 2020 by pouring millions “into Biden-related PACs and voting groups to change voting laws.” In one of his last acts as president, Biden awarded George Soros with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Only now are these oligarchs dangerous because some voted for Trump, and a few will be working with the new administration. Big Tech has been guilty of censoring speech and promoting disinformation, but the former president and his party only noticed the problem when they were no longer in charge.

Kerby Anderson
Pornography and porn sites were the topic of the Supreme Court earlier this month. The key question was whether requiring age verification on a porn site violates the First Amendment.
Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is the case currently before the high court. Texas passed a law requiring porn purveyors to start using “reasonable age verification methods.” Other states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Virginia, Utah) have passed similar porn site age laws.
The Texas brief explains that the law “does not prevent adults from viewing pornography.” Instead, the law “requires online pornographers to take commercially reasonable steps to ensure that their customers are not children.”
The lead challenger in the case is the Free Speech Coalition. It is described as an “adult entertainment” industry group that argued that age verification is too great a burden on First Amendment rights. They also raised concerns about privacy and security risks.
Having a 21st century Supreme Court ruling on pornography is important. The court’s ruling in pornography and obscenity in Miller v. California came in 1973. Texas cites the case Ginsberg v. New York that dealt with selling magazines to minors, but that decision came down in 1968.
Technology has changed the world in the last two decades. Young people have access to pornography through computers and smartphones. The most recent survey found that a clear majority of children have a smartphone by age 11.
Here are two points I believe the justices should consider. First, children should be protected from the scourge of pornography. We know the dangers. Second, digital age verification is becoming common place. It places no significant burden on First Amendment rights.

Kerby Anderson
Charles Cooke recently asked, “Are Californians Near the Tipping Point?” He asked that question because of the reaction from many in Southern California to how politicians handled the devastating wildfires.
He begins by saying that he loves California and explains that he isn’t just saying that because he is about to criticize many of the political leaders in California. He devotes many sentences to list the many positives about the state and its citizens.
He then focuses on how California is badly run. He also says that isn’t just because he disagrees politically with California politicians. He explains that he doesn’t agree with the politics of Massachusetts, but he acknowledges that Massachusetts is “pretty solidly governed.”
With those two disclaimers out of the way, he concentrates on what California does poorly. The state “is run by people who are incompetent at the tasks of taxing and spending, passing and enforcing laws, representing their constituents, and dealing with emergencies.”
Put another way, “its politicians have forgotten how to do the basics. One can get away with a great deal of ideology, wastefulness, and self-indulgence if the schools are good, the roads are smooth, the police are allowed to do their jobs, the housing is affordable, and the natural disasters are addressed swiftly and sanely.”
Charles Cooke isn’t the only person wondering if California voters are at a tipping point. Of course, it is too early to tell if a disaster in 2025 will affect an election in 2026 or 2028. But we have seen how a poor performance in a presidential debate last year changed everything in the 2024 elections.
I predict that a big issue in future elections will be competence. Voters might be willing to get rid of incompetent politicians.

Penna Dexter
In one of his final lawless acts, just three days before leaving office, President Biden proclaimed that the Equal Rights Amendment is “the law of the land.” Congress passed this amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1972 and gave it seven years to achieve ratification by three fourths of the states.
Proponents claimed the ERA would protect women’s rights by prohibiting discrimination based on sex.
Thirty-five states ratified. In a constitutionally questionable move, Congress extended the deadline three more years. Still the amendment failed to garner the necessary support of 38 states. Five states rescinded their ratifications. The ERA expired. It’s dead.
The ERA would not protect women’s rights. Over a decade of consideration, it became clear it would severely undermine many commonsense protections for women and could be used to end even modest restrictions on abortion.
According to Kristin Waggoner, President of Alliance Defending Freedom, the ERA is worse today than it was in the 70’s. She points out: “the word ‘woman’ never appears in the ERA.” Instead,” she writes, “the amendment focuses on ‘sex’ — a word increasingly in danger of becoming meaningless as ideologues push to disassociate the term from biology and replace it with ‘gender identity’.”
Under state and local ERA-type policies, women and girls are already seeing their physical privacy, their athletic opportunities, even their physical safety compromised.
In a misguided attempt to revive the ERA, Nevada and Illinois passed bills to “ratify” the amendment. Virginia did so in 2020. Supporters claimed victory. But, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council, twice, declared the ERA “expired.” So did the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Archivist of the United States would be the person responsible for the amendment’s publication. Dr. Colleen Shogan and her deputy declared, just last month, that the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.”
Someone must kill the Zombie ERA.

Kerby Anderson
Although Congress needs to reevaluate various programs like Social Security, it is unlikely it will do so for two reasons. First, it would be politically unwise to even modify any of the so-called “entitlement programs.” It is the third rail of American politics. Touch it and you die.
But the other reason isn’t political; it’s cultural. Americans have an expectation of retiring at age 65. Morgan Housel has a chart in his book The Psychology of Money that illustrates this. The labor force participation rate for men age 65+ was 78 percent in 1880 and only dropped to 58 percent by 1930. But Social Security changed all that. Today the labor force participation for men 65+ is 27 percent.
Social Security wasn’t intended to provide a pension for retirement. When Ida May Fuller cashed in the first Social Security check in 1940, it was for $22.54 (that would be $416 when adjusted for inflation).
Even before Social Security was implemented, many in the Western world began to believe retirement begins at age 65. Germany was the first nation to adopt an old-age insurance program. This was 70 years before President Roosevelt proposed the Social Security system we have today.
Some brave politicians have suggested we might at least raise the age of retirement. As Morgan Housel reminds us that “It was not until the 1980s that the idea that everyone deserves, and should have, a dignified retirement took hold.” But also reminds us that the 401(k) didn’t exist until 1978, and the Roth IRA was not implemented until 1998.
Congress needs to address the financial concerns about the future of Social Security, but politics and cultural expectations make it hard to do so.

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday, I talked about some of the transformations in 1776 that Andrew Wilson discussed in his book, Remaking the World. They are identified by the acronym WEIRDER. W stands for “western” and globalization while E stands for “educated” and the Enlightenment.
I stands for “industrialized” and focuses on the industrial revolution. One event was James Watt’s invention of the steam engine. Western society no longer depended upon muscle power or horsepower.
R stands for “rich” and focuses on the “great enrichment.” Adam Smith published the Wealth of Nations in 1776. The industrial revolution and capitalism led to a significant increase in life expectancy and the rise of social development.
D stands for “democratic” and focuses on the American Revolution. Of course, the Declaration of Independence was ratified in 1776, and the Constitution starts with “We the people.” This Spirit of 76 has spread throughout the world.
E stands for “ex-Christian” and focuses on the rejection of Christianity. During this time, we see the rise of deism, agnosticism, and atheism. Although some believed the Bible, many others rejected the biblical view of God and the authority of the Bible.
R stands for “romantic” and focuses on the romantic revolution. This is when Rousseau developed the concept of self and expressive individualism. And the seeds of the sexual revolution in the 20th century were first sown in 1776.
Andrew Wilson catalogues these transformations but also believes there are many opportunities for Christians and the church in what is becoming a post-secular world. We need to speak truth into this post-Christian culture.

Kerby Anderson
The year 1776 changed the western world in significant ways. That is the conclusion of Andrew Wilson (pastor at King’s Church in London) in his book, Remaking the World. He was on my radio program to discuss his book.
He explains, “The big idea of this book is that 1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are.” He describes it as “a year that witnessed seven transformations taking place—globalization, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, the American Revolution, the rise of post-Christianity, and the dawn of Romanticism.”
He describes this society as one that, “relative to others past and present, is WEIRDER. Each letter is an acronym (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic). He concludes that “The vast majority of people in human history have not shared our views of work, family, government, religion, sex, identity, or morality.”
W stands for “western” and focuses on the issue of globalization. One key event is the voyage of Captain James Cook. His travels generated certain questions like: Why were some natives more advanced than others? Western society began to get to the deep roots of culture and wondered why Western society developed before other cultures.
E stands for “educated” and focuses on the impact of the Enlightenment. Obviously, the Enlightenment started nearly a century before, but one high point was 1776. That was the year that Immanuel Kant drafted his Critique of Pure Reason and the year that Edward Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
Tomorrow we will look at other events in 1776 that led to the remaking our of world.

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday I talked about apples and inflation. There is another way to think about the inflation that has been part of our economy for the past 100 years.
The supply of U.S. dollars has been expanding on average about 7 percent each year for the last century. That means the value of dollars is cut in half about every 10 years. Just use the “rule of 72.” Divide 7 percent into 72. That means the half-life of the US dollar has been about 10 years.
We may not notice the decreasing value of dollars until we get even higher inflation. But think of what a 10-year-half-life for the dollar means to you. For me, it means that money I put into a Wells Fargo savings account when I was in grade school has been cut in half six times.
The U.S. dollar is still the reserve currency of the world. And yet this is what happens with the best fiat currency in the world. If you hold your savings in cash, you are losing value every year. If you hold some of your savings in assets, the value of the asset usually goes up simply because it takes more dollars to purchase it. But for it to appreciate, your asset has to be both scarce and desirable.
Now, imagine if you lived in Venezuela or Argentina or Lebanon or Turkey. If your country increases the currency each year by 18 percent, your currency’s half-life is 4 years. If your country increases the currency by 30 percent, it has a 2.5-year-half-life. That is why citizens in these countries can never get ahead.
When I hear people tell me that financially they are just “treading water,” I am tempted to tell them that they are really sinking. Printing more U.S. dollars makes everyone poorer unless they have assets appreciating faster than the money printer.

Kerby Anderson
Today the U.S. is getting a new president. Soon, Canada will be getting a new prime minister. The new prime minister may be Pierre Poilievre. He was recently asked what steps he would take to fix the damages done from inflation. Here is his answer:
“First and foremost, stop the overspending. Inflation, high taxes, deficits, high interest rates, are all symptoms. The disease is overspending. When governments spend too much money there’s only three ways to get it. One is to raise your taxes. The other is to borrow, which means that they’ll tax you more later on. And the third way is to print money. Now printing money seems like a painless way to pay for things.”
He then explained, “If you have 10 apples and $10 in the economy, it’s a buck an apple. If you double the number of dollars in the economy to 20, you still only have 10 apples, You’re not twice as rich. It’s just that each apple costs twice as much. And that is a tax on the working people because it chews up the purchasing power of your paycheck only to pay for government’s excessive government spending. And it balloons the asset values of the billionaires so it’s a real transfer from the have-nots to those who have yachts. Inflation is the worst and most immoral tax. It always results from government creating cash.”
His answer was both clear and correct. When government spends more than it takes in, the usual answer is to print more money. It really isn’t that complicated. We just need more people in leadership like him.
We need more politicians who understand why we have inflation and can explain the problem to the citizens. I must applaud his clear explanation and common-sense solution. We need more Canadian and American leaders like him.

Penna Dexter
I love living in Texas but, by birth and upbringing, I’m an LA girl — born in Pasadena, raised in a beach town, and educated at a university near downtown.
I’m mourning the massive damage and destruction to life, homes, businesses, and landmarks in places I’ve loved.
I remember dreading the Santa Ana winds, which sweep down from the deserts. They come every year and, because California is dry, they bring fires.
The LA Fire Department has over a hundred years’ experience fighting these fires. Each year, when the Devil Winds came, they’d be on it. Lately, the job is taking much longer.
What’s making things harder? Neglect, leftist environmental policy, and poor leadership.
Decaying power lines have been a huge problem — now (supposedly) being addressed. California promised to do better at keeping forest floors “cleaned” of burnable fuel. But “green” pushback prioritizes the “ecosystem” over humans. Voters have demanded new reservoirs. None have been built since 1979. Construction on a new one won’t begin until 2032.
Fire hydrants started running out of water during the first day of this year’s firefighting. Years of bad water policy means there’s insufficient water to fill the reservoirs they have.
In 2008, California began diverting 100 billion gallons of water per year away from Southern California and into the Pacific Ocean to “save” a fish, the Delta smelt. Governor Gavin Newsome has refused to restore the flow of excess rainwater and snow melt from the north to Southern California.
LA Mayor Karen Bass knew of the huge fire risk. Recently, she cut department funding.
And Kristin Crowley, LA’s first female and LGBTQ Fire Chief has wide experience in firefighting. But “promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity” is her stated priority. LA’s three top fire officials are lesbian women. Few males are hired as firemen.
There’s another sad reality: Insurers have been cutting coverage in at-risk areas.
California needs a political reckoning – and our prayers.
Follow this link to an interactive map: https://bit.ly/CALFIRE3Dmap

Kerby Anderson
When I first started writing this commentary nearly two decades ago, the average woman in the United States had 2.1 children in her lifetime. This is what many demographers called “the golden number.” To sustain a population in any country, women on average need to produce 2.1 children. If that number is higher, the population increases. If that number is lower, the population decreases.
Years later, Lou Dobbs devoted an entire chapter in his book, Upheaval, to the subject of “Demographics and Destiny Disturbed.” He was on my radio program back then and talked about the fact that the fertility rate in America had now declined to about 1.7. He also lamented the abortions of over 60 million unborn.
But if you think America is facing a problem, consider Japan with a fertility rate of 1.39. It is imploding. By the end of this century, Japan’s population will be less than half of its current population. Japanese consumers are buying more adult diapers than baby diapers.
Other countries also face incredible challenges because of declining fertility rates. Greece has a fertility rate (1.4) equal to Japan’s fertility rate. Spain’s fertility rate is 1.12. The fertility rate of South Korea and of China is also 1.12.
China’s “one-child policy” meant “that as many as 400 million Chinese children were not born.” By the end of the century, the country will likely have about one-third of the population that it has now. It moved from a one-child policy in 2015 to a three-child policy in 2021. But the birth rate continues to fall.
Declining fertility rates illustrate once again that demography is destiny.