Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson

Kerby Anderson
Each year, we take time from our busy lives to celebrate a day of Thanksgiving. Though many holidays have become secular celebrations, this holiday still retains much of its historic religious overtones.
A day of Thanksgiving was set aside by the Pilgrims who founded Plymouth Colony. Life was hard in the New World. Half of the Pilgrims died in the first terrible winter. After the first harvest was completed, Governor William Bradford proclaimed a day of Thanksgiving and prayer. By 1623, a day of fasting and prayer during a period of drought was changed to one of Thanksgiving because the rain came during their prayers. The custom prevailed in New England and eventually became a national holiday.
Religious freedom is one of the lessons of Thanksgiving. In 1606, William Brewster led a group of Separatists to Leiden (in the Netherlands) to escape religious persecution in England. After living in Leiden for more than ten years, some members of the group voted to emigrate to America. Having been blown off course from their intended landing in Virginia by a terrible storm, the Pilgrims landed at Cape Cod in November 1620. While still on the ship, the Pilgrims signed the Mayflower Compact.
The Mayflower Compact provides the second lesson of Thanksgiving: the importance of political freedom.  On November 11, 1620, Governor William Bradford and the leaders on the Mayflower signed the Mayflower Compact before setting foot on land. They wanted to acknowledge God’s sovereignty in their lives and their need to obey Him.
During this Thanksgiving season, let’s return to the wisdom of the Pilgrims. They valued their freedom and were willing to endure hardship in order to come to this country and freely worship. Let us thank God for these freedoms and be willing to defend them against all who would seek to take them away.

Kerby Anderson
Thanksgiving is tomorrow, and I suspect that you are doing lots of things to get ready for this special day. Let me suggest you add one more item to your to-do list. Visit our website and download a copy of my Thanksgiving Quiz.
Thanksgiving is a wonderful time to gather as a family, but I also believe it can be a great time to teach our children and grandchildren about America’s godly heritage. I created this short quiz to be a conversation-starter around the Thanksgiving table.
We used to go around the table before the meal and ask our children to tell us what they were thankful for. After a few years of hearing about how they were thankful for their cat, their doll, and their video games, I knew we needed to do something else.
The Thanksgiving Quiz was born out of that frustration. It has twenty questions and answers on the Pilgrims and the Mayflower Compact as well as some questions and answers about the Christian heritage of America.
Who were the Pilgrims and why did they leave Europe for America? Why did they celebrate Thanksgiving? What is the Mayflower Compact, and why is it significant? What lessons did the Pilgrims learn about work and even free enterprise? How did the Christian faith influence America? These are just a few of the sorts of questions that you can ask around the table and give short answers.
Perhaps it is time to recapture the importance of Thanksgiving. On the bicentennial celebration of the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, Daniel Webster, on December 22, 1820, declared the following: “Let us not forget the religious character of our origin. Our fathers were brought hither by their high veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.”
It is my hope this quiz will help your family see the importance of Thanksgiving.

Kerby Anderson
Earlier this month, Dominic Pino wrote about “Milton Friedman’s Revenge.” His argument was that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris got the economic policy they wanted and the voters hated. It’s worth looking back to understand why the election went the way it did.
Milton Friedman was an economist best known for saying that inflation is “always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon.” He believed that inflation occurs when the money supply increases faster than output.
Four years ago, candidate Joe Biden announced, “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” Of course, Friedman wasn’t running the show even before Biden was elected. But once Biden was elected, he proceeded to spend money and run up deficits. By 2021, the New Republic proclaimed: “The End of Friedmanomics.”
First came the American Rescue Plan Act, followed by an infrastructure law, the CHIPS Act, and then finally the intentionally misnamed Inflation Reduction Act. Biden spent more and more federal money. Democrats even invented the word “Bidenomics” to describe their economic theory. The Biden administration ran up budget deficits which as a share of GDP were greater than those in the Great Depression.
Rising inflation was inevitable. As I have mentioned in previous commentaries, economist Larry Summers warned that the American Rescue Plan would “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.” Someone should have paid attention to him since he served as Barack Obama’s Treasury Secretary. But his warning was mocked. He was right, and the skeptics were wrong.
When voters were given an opportunity to express their opinion about Bidenomics, two thirds (68%) of voters in exit polls said the economy was “not good” or “poor.” That’s why we can call this “Milton Friedman’s Revenge.”

Kerby Anderson
Donald Trump hasn’t even been sworn into office, and yet governors in blue states and the legacy media are already criticizing a deportation program that hasn’t even begun. Unfortunately, some of the comments aren’t merely hostile but grossly inaccurate. If we are going to have a worthwhile debate about deportation, then let’s get accurate facts on the table.
First, Tom Homan, the newly designated “border czar,” has made his three-step process very clear. The primary focus will be the deportation of national security threats, with a secondary focus on individuals with a criminal record in this country or their country of origin.
Second, there are more than 1.2 million people in this country illegally that have had full legal due process and have received a final deportation order from an immigration judge. Those were the numbers as of September a year ago. The actual number may be close to 1.5 million to 1.6 million.
Byron York points out that in an ironic twist, the Trump administration may end up using the Mayorkas Memorandum created by the current Secretary of Homeland Security in the Biden administration. The memo lays out the rules for deporting illegal immigrants.
It sets as the first priorities the “apprehension and removal of noncitizens who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security.” It explains that the first group was terrorists and spies. The second group were criminals. The third group were those who are a threat to border security. Those would be immigrants who were apprehended after November 2020.
Critics are already howling about the possibility of deportations, and the decibels are certain to increase. But Americans need to know that these first deportations will be the removal of people most of us don’t want in this country.

Penna Dexter
Speaking last month before the United Nations General Assembly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas warned that he intends to submit documents to start the process of expelling Israel from the United Nations. His reason? Israel’s refusal to cede its territory to create a Palestinian state.
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz, discussing the threat on his podcast Verdict, said if Israel is removed from membership, the United States may, itself, withdraw from the U.N.
Senator Cruz says, “If the U.N. expels Israel, the U.S. should halt all funding from America to the U.N.”
The United States is, by far, the U.N.’s largest benefactor.
In a letter to lawmakers, the senator from Texas wrote, “The effort to diplomatically isolate Israel is aimed at ultimately destroying the Jewish state, which is both obscene and antithetical to American national security interests.”
Now may be a good time to discuss U.S. participation in the United Nations. Israel is not the only point of contention.
We should also oppose the ongoing efforts at the U.N. to make abortion an international human right, and its promotion of protected class status based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
U.N. directives often find themselves being debated in Congress. Last week Congressman Nikema Williams, along with 100 Democrat co-sponsors, introduced a resolution declaring an international right to abortion. According to Stephano Gennarini, Vice President for Legal Studies with the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), “There is no international right to abortion under any treaty ratified by the U.S. government.”
C-Fam’s Friday FAX explains that the U.N. Human Rights Committee, which monitors compliance with U.N. civil rights agreements, “routinely goes beyond its mandate calling on governments to decriminalize abortion in all circumstances.”
Mr. Gennarini also says a treaty has been drafted that treats lobbying and political activity opposing pro-trans policies as crimes against humanity.
The U.S. has leverage at the U.N. Will we use it to stop this stuff?

Kerby Anderson
Next week is Thanksgiving week. But many Americans are dreading the annual ritual of gathering families together because of the 2024 election. You might hope that the shock, grief, and anger would subside after this election, but this post-election distress continues.
CBS did a story on “Post-election Emotions.” It offered expert tips and resources to manage a person’s mental health after the 2024 elections. Liberal women say it is “time to learn from the Koreans and adopt the 4B movement” in this country (by shaving their heads and denouncing men).
An article in Psychiatric Times, reflected on a similar experience after Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election. Her followers talked about their feeling of betrayal and felt they were living in an alternate reality.
Journalist Mark Halperin predicted that the reaction to the Trump victory might be the cause of the biggest mental health crisis in the history of this country. In an interview he did with Tucker Carlson, he explained that “tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation and their connection to other human beings.”
The election has rattled their vision of the future. He added, “I don’t think it will be kind of a passing thing that by the inauguration will be fine. I think it will be sustained and unprecedented.” He even thinks that we will see violence. “I think there’ll be workplace fights. There’ll be fights at kids’ birthday parties. I think there’ll be protests that will turn violent.”
We can hope that his fearful prophecy does not come to pass, but we should be prepared for the social turmoil ahead. As I have been traveling around the country, many people say they are concerned about the possibility of conflict because of the polarized nature of our society.  Thanksgiving week might provide a glimpse into the future.

Kerby Anderson
Chuck Bentley is the CEO of Crown Financial and the host of the daily radio broadcast, My MoneyLife. He was on my radio program last week to talk about this question he received from a listener: “I am really concerned with what Elon Musk said about America heading toward bankruptcy. Do you think there is anything we need to do if he turns out to be correct?”
Elon Musk has said this on a recent All-In Summit hosted by the All-In Podcast: “America is going bankrupt extremely quickly, and everyone seems to be sort of whistling past the graveyard on this one.”
Chuck Bentley attributes much of the problem to the promotion and popularity of what is called “modern monetary theory.” The economists and politicians believe our currency is like Monopoly Money. They argue that we can ignore deficits and ignore the growing national debt since the government will always be able to print enough money to pay its debts. But he warns we are headed for a downward debt loop.
During the program, I explained that we aren’t the only people concerned about this. Chuck Bentley quotes from an article by Les Rubin who admitted: “The government CAN pay their loans due to their unlimited ability to borrow—for now—or print more money, as long as other countries and investors will continue to buy our bonds.” But in the article, he then warned that it will eventually stop and “we will have to default, leading to severe consequences.”
Both Chuck Bentley and I concluded that if Elon Musk and the proposed Government Efficiency Commission cannot reduce spending, then the economic future for this country isn’t very bright.

Kerby Anderson
Now that the 2024 election is in the rearview mirror, there are some steps we need to take to improve our future elections. Much of this needed to be done four years ago, but anytime you talked about improving our electoral process, you were usually accused of trying to change the election. Now that this election was more decisive, it provides an opportunity to make some needed changes.
That’s why I invited Hans von Spakovsky to come on my radio program. He was a member of the Federal Election Commission, is the senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and is the manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative.
When he is asked about the state of election integrity, he responds that we are in better shape nationally than we were last time, but much depends on what state you live in and vote in. Sadly, he also pointed out there is also a problem with state attorneys general and secretaries of state who are unwilling to enforce good state election laws.
On my program, he talked about the fact that he often is tasked with briefing European election observers. They are shocked and astounded to find out that two states with some of the nation’s largest populations do NOT require ID to vote.
Every state has work to do. He has put together an “Election Integrity Scorecard” that analyzed all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It provided an assessment of laws, regulations, and administrative practices of each state. He reported that no state scored 100 when he launched the Scorecard, and that is still the case.
Our goal for elections in this country should be “to make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.” Before the next important election, let’s get to work.

Kerby Anderson
The election of Donald Trump will advance the cause of religious liberty. That is the conclusion of First Liberty President Kelly Shackelford. On my radio program he talked about Trump policies in his first term that offer hope for the future of religious liberty and then quoted from the speech Trump gave at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention.
We’ve provided a link to an article with a complete list of policies, along with a link to a video by Kelly Shackelford. Here are just a few reasons why the future of religious liberty in this country looks bright.
Former President Trump’s executive orders on religious liberty made a difference when he was in office. His 2017 Executive Order on Protecting Religious Liberty was able to advance religious freedom across all federal executive agencies. His 2019 Executive Order on Combating Anti-Semitism prohibited discrimination against Jewish communities and believers.
Kelly Shackelford also talked about the establishment of the HHS Conscience and Religious Freedom division. One of his former employees was able to direct the agency’s efforts to protect religious freedom and people of faith in the healthcare industry.
What will a Trump administration do in the future? Trump’s speech at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention delineated seven major actions.
One was the development of a Religious Liberty Task Force. Trump explained that he would “create a new federal task force [to fight] anti-Christian bias” and it would “investigate all forms of illegal discrimination, harassment, and persecution against Christians in America.” He also promised he would protect Christians, religious symbols, and religious expression and speech.
The election of Donald Trump is good news for those of us concerned about the future of religious liberty in America.

Kerby Anderson
Donald Trump won, and Kamala Harris lost, for many reasons. Certainly, the economy was one of the major reasons. Pundits and economists tried to tell the voters that the economy was doing just fine. The voters didn’t agree. Neither did the financial markets. Stocks rose immediately the moment it was obvious that Trump won.
The editors of The Wall Street Journal argued that the stock market rally suggested “a groundswell of growth optimism. Voters have taken off the table a big tax increase and continued regulatory barrage.” Voters and investors were fearful of looming higher taxes and had already seen enough of a regulatory assault that took place under Biden-Harris.
The editors do warn that stocks could fall in the future if the Trump policies turn out to be a disappointment. Concern over tariffs might be the next concern on Wall Street and on main street. But those concerns pale in comparison to the last few years of the highest inflation in 40 years and lower real wages. If you run the numbers, inflation-adjusted weekly earnings remain lower than when President Biden took office.
Inflation wasn’t the only issue; so were interest rates. High interest rates made it even more difficult to buy a home or to afford a new car. The average mortgage payment doubled over the last four years. “The bottom 40 percent of earners accounted for 6 percent of new auto purchases last year, compared to 18 percent in 2019.”
Millions of voters who didn’t vote for Trump in 2016 or 2020 voted for him this time. A significant percentage of them “never voted for a Republican for President in their lives.” They were ready to say bye to Bidenomics.

Penna Dexter
It’s been a long time since conservatives expected fair and balanced coverage of elections by the legacy media. But the Left counts on traditional news outlets to tip the scales with favorable coverage of its candidates and issues.
True to form, major outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, NBC, ABC, and CBS covered the 2024 campaigns and handled debates and interviews in the biased way they always do. But in this election, the media’s failure to provide truthful and fair coverage hurt the Left.
Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel writes, “So long as the left is pointing fingers, let it direct a big, fat digit at the outfit that played the biggest role in losing it the election: the U.S. media.”
We cannot place the media in one overarching category. The Journal itself is legacy media, but its editorial page skews right. Today, Americans have numerous media outlets to choose from.
And so do candidates.
Even The Washington Post points out that “Trump and his surrogates saw incredible value in tapping into a podcast ecosystem that has large numbers of young male listeners who otherwise might have skipped casting ballots.“
Meanwhile much of the media ignored, and expected voters to ignore, border chaos, higher prices, and especially President Biden’s decline. As Kim Strassel points out: “In a world with a competent press, Mr. Biden’s failing constitution would have been front page news.” Instead, the legacy media cooperated with the Democrats in covering it up. If they had done a better job reporting on it, there would have been time to hold a primary which “would have produced a tested nominee.”
Big shock: Americans didn’t buy narratives like “we’re experiencing one of the strongest economies ever” or “crime is falling.”
First Amendment freedoms include the press because the press is meant to provide politicians with “gut checks as to how their policies sit with the nation.” Traditional news outlets face a reckoning.

Kerby Anderson
Ned Ryun begins his article with these questions: What if I told you that the President of the United States doesn’t really run our government? Or that most people in Washington, D.C., don’t really believe in representative democracy? Or that a government of, by, and for the people is just an illusion?
His article and his book, American Leviathan: The Birth of the Administrative State and Progressive Authoritarianism, explains that we have moved from a republic to an un-American administrative state. He calls it a slow regime change or a gradual coup that is undermining our Constitution and our Constitutional Republic. It has undercut the original intent of the Constitution. It has eroded our freedoms. It has undermined our civil liberties.
Back to his original questions. The administrative state calls into question who is governing our country. We have seen this in the last few years of the Biden administration. So many of us wondered who was making the important decisions, since it seemed obvious to most of us that the president wasn’t up to the task mentally.
Ned Ryun provides the history that goes back to the Progressive movement led by Woodrow Wilson. The goal was to build a massive bureaucracy filled with unelected bureaucrats who were separated from political accountability. These elites would govern our country. They rejected the idea of a rights-based government because it was too limited in size and scope. That is why today we have a sprawling federal bureaucracy.
He argues that the president and Congress need to break apart the Administrative State and return legislative powers back to the Article I branch of government. To put it in simple terms, it is time to “drain the swamp.” If this is to happen, we need more than slogans. We need action.

Kerby Anderson
Elon Musk noted on X that giving more money to homelessness charities in California did not seem to reduce the number of homeless people. In response, Konstantin Kisin reminded him about the Cobra Effect and was surprised to discover how many people hadn’t heard of it.
The Cobra Effect is based on a story which may or may not have taken place during British colonial rule in India. According to the story, the British wanted to reduce the cobra population and offered a bounty for every dead cobra. But the cobra problem got worse because people realized they could profit from this bounty and began raising cobras in farms. When the government became aware of this practice, they discontinued the bounty program. The cobra breeders released their now worthless snakes into the wild making the problem worse.
In the past, I’ve talked about how the Cobra Effect surfaced in the attempt to combat racism. Anti-racist groups and organizations formed to combat racism. But they soon faced a problem. The demand to find racism was much larger than the supply. Soon we were hearing about microaggressions, and the charge of racism was thrown around indiscriminately.
The problem of homelessness in California, Kisin argues, came not only from the “attempts to deal with it failing, but was also the result of well-intentioned policies, the deinstitutionalization movement, whose goal was to free people of the tyranny of mental asylums.” The mentally ill people released into the streets fell through the cracks. Today cities are littered with tents and drug addicts on the streets.
These are just two examples of many others that remind us that good intentions don’t always solve social problems.

Kerby Anderson
The U.S. dollar has lost half of its purchasing power in just the last 30 years. Put another way, that means that one dollar today can only buy 50 cents worth of goods and services compared to the 1990s. In less than a single generation, the dollars in your wallet or purse can only buy half as much.
Once you understand that depressing statistic, you can also begin to see why the wealth gap in this country is increasing. If you have your wealth sitting in cash (bank accounts, checking accounts, etc.), you are losing ground. However, if you have your wealth in investments (stocks, housing, land, etc.), you are doing much better.
Thirty years ago, a dollar would allow you to buy two apples. Today, a dollar will only allow you to buy one apple. By contrast, if you use that dollar (and many others with it) to buy stock, the value of the stock is worth twice as much because it takes twice as many dollars to purchase it.
This problem isn’t just affecting young Americans who would like to buy a house. It is also affecting seniors who put their savings in pensions and retirement plans. They are becoming aware that the money they set aside in their retirement plans has not kept up with inflation and there won’t be enough for them because of the dollar’s declining value.
This simple illustration helps focus on the real problem facing America in the future. The dollar is broken simply because more and more of it is being printed each year. Yes, we can lower the cost of living some by increasing energy production. Yes, protecting American markets will provide more jobs for the American people.
But we need to fix the money. Until we do so, the problem I just illustrated will be worse for the American consumer.

Kerby Anderson
Last week, six states voted on pot initiatives, and more are certain to come in the next election. In previous commentaries, I have noted that the push for legalization of marijuana has come at a time when we know more about the dangers of cannabis than we knew a few decades ago. In a recent Breakpoint commentary, John Stonestreet concludes that “The Pot Experiment Has Been a Disaster.” It has been a disaster, for many reasons.
The first reason is potency. Ann Colter’s recent column reminds us that “It’s Not Your Father’s Pot Anymore.” When I was growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the kids around me were using marijuana that had about 2-3 percent THC. Today the marijuana sold at cannabis dispensaries can have 15-25 percent THC. The National Institute on Drug Abuse reports that about 30 percent of cannabis users will become addicted, especially if they start before age 18.
Health and safety are another reason. Just look at the statistics from states that have participated in this rushed social experiment to legalize marijuana. Increases in car crashes along with property crimes and violent crimes followed legalization. In Colorado (the first state to legalize recreational marijuana), marijuana DUIs increased. And 40 percent of stoned drivers were under the age of 18.
A third reason is mental health. I received lots of pushback the first time I did a radio program with a guest documenting the link between marijuana use and schizophrenia. That shouldn’t even be controversial now, since there is a new study from Denmark that found that 30 percent of schizophrenia cases could be linked to marijuana use.
Each year more states are legalizing marijuana. But just because cannabis is becoming legal doesn’t mean it is a good policy for individuals or for society.

Kerby Anderson
While most Americans were focused on the election, the BRICS nations had a conference in Russia that we should not ignore. In case you are wondering, BRICS is an acronym for some of the world’s leading emerging market economies. BRICS stands for Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.
At the conference, there were 9 members and 13 new “partner nations” who were accepted. That means that the GDP of the BRICS nations is now greater than the GDP of the G7 nations. The population of the BRICS nations is more than 3 billion.
Some pundits have wondered if a BRICS currency would threaten the status of the dollar. Until recently, the assumption has been that would be unlikely since the diversity of the various foreign economies. They wouldn’t likely settle on one currency.
But Matthew Sigel (Head of Digital Assets Research, VanEck) reminds us that three of the new members are now mining bitcoin with government resources. He explained that there is an urgency in the BRICS nations to find some way to circumvent the irresponsible US fiscal policy. Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund is going to invest in a regional initiative to build bitcoin mining and to build AI infrastructure throughout the BRICS nations with the goal of being able to settle global trade in bitcoin.
Sigel predicts that when President Putin dies, some of these countries may reintegrate into the world’s financial system. He says these BRICS countries will be trading with bitcoin and then wonders what the US will be doing at that time.
The US dollar has been the world’s primary reserve currency for over 60 years. Now, these countries are pursuing a policy of de-dollarization that will reduce the use of dollars in world trade and financial transactions. Congress and the incoming president need to take note.

Penna Dexter
Election day was almost upon us — the editorial endorsing Kamala Harris had already been written — when William Lewis, CEO and Publisher of The Washington Post announced the paper would not be endorsing a presidential candidate, ending a 50-year tradition of doing so.
Immediately after the announcement, The Post began bleeding subscribers — 250,000 of them within four days. Several staff members resigned in protest. Longtime opinion writer Ruth Marcus titled her column, “The Post, the wrong choice at the worst possible time.”
Owner Jeff Bezos wrote his own column explaining that The Post can no longer ignore polling that reveals falling public trust in journalists and the media. “What presidential endorsements do,” he wrote, “is create a perception of bias.” He said, “Ending them is a principled decision.” Other newspapers — The LA Times and USA Today – took the same action citing awareness of their own “lack of credibility.”
The Washington Post is not profitable and is becoming less so. Subscribers are turning to smaller, independent news outlets and social media. But, to do good investigative reporting, a news organization needs a large infrastructure. Covering the U.S. government takes a huge staff. The Post has these things. But, Mr. Bezos wrote, his paper and The New York Times “talk only to a certain elite” and increasingly “only to ourselves.” It would be good to have a centrist DC-based paper. If The Washington Post took serious steps away from its role as purveyor of leftist propaganda, it would be better for all of us.
Mr. Bezos also reportedly told The Post’s management it needs to hire more conservative columnists. Radio host Erick Erickson suggested that, if Mr. Bezos is serious about creating a balance, the paper should also add conservative editors and reporters “to break the leftwing worldview infused into the news product they produce.”
It would take deep structural and ideological shifts for The Washington Post to shed its reputation for extreme bias.

Kerby Anderson
The crisis of men and boys is well known and well documented. My radio interviews with Dr. Warren Farrell about his book, The Boy Crisis is but one example. Jordan Peterson has been speaking and writing about his concerns for many years. The latest warning comes from a David Brooks op-ed in the New York Times and the publication of a new book by Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men.
For example, boys are struggling in the classroom. “American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be ‘school ready’ than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics.”
“Men are struggling in the workplace. One in three American men with only a high school diploma — 10 million men — is now out of the labor force.” And men are also struggling physically. They account for nearly three out of four “deaths of despair” (suicide and drug overdoses) in our country.
The new book by Richard Reeves provides more concerning documentation of a crisis of men and boys. One surprising finding was the boys are much more hindered by challenging environments like poverty or broken homes. He also explains that the many policies and programs designed to promote social mobility work for women, but not for men. For example, government programs like early childhood education produced significant gains for women but did not for men.
When we had a roundtable discussion of these issues, we concluded that these authors did a good job of identifying the problems but could not offer a solution to a society still searching for a “modern masculine ideal.” Therefore, pastors and men in the church need to provide a biblical foundation for manhood and must teach it to the boys and men in the church. We need a biblical answer to a major crisis in our culture.

Kerby Anderson
Twenty years ago, I did an interview with Bernard Goldberg on his book, Bias. I bring it up because his analysis has stood the test of time. At the time, he was the first media insider to reveal what many of us suspected about the background and attitudes of the people who determine what you read, see, and hear in the media. There were other studies (like the Lichter-Rothman studies) that also provided insight. But Bernard Goldberg’s book provided lots of information and an important perspective.
His perspective was helpful because it set aside the idea that media bias was part of some liberal conspiracy. He said: “There isn’t a well-orchestrated, vast left-wing conspiracy in America’s newsrooms.” Instead, he said that “the bitter truth” is worse. Essentially what we have in “the mainstream media” is a common worldview that is promoted in the newsrooms and promoted in the way news stories are covered.
Various studies of the media elite conclude that the people who determine what is newsworthy and how it is covered are very different from the rest of the American public. Let’s look at some examples.
Polling data of political parties shows that the United States is about evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. But when you ask journalists to identify their political party, you only find that 4 percent of them identify themselves as Republican.
One study found that members of the media when compared to the public at large are less likely to get married and have children. They are less likely to own homes. And they are less likely to go to church or synagogue. How many of the journalists polled belonged to the American Legion or service organizations like the Rotary Club? The answer was zero.
Twenty years later, Bernard Goldberg’s book still reminds us that the media elite views the world differently than the average American.

Kerby Anderson
Many colleges and universities have speech codes and other policies that narrow the realms of permissible speech. And what started on campus has made its way to the broader society.
This was a topic on my radio program when one day I was interviewing the president of a Christian college and the next day I was interviewing Nadine Strossen (former president of the ACLU). Both were against the suppression of speech even though they come from different political perspectives.
Erwin Lutzer, in his new book No Reason to Hide, devotes part of a chapter to how words and policies suppress speech. He believes that word control will lead to thought control. It puts parameters around what people can say.
One university posted a list of offensive words. Students and faculty must stop using words and phrases like picnic, trigger warning, and even rule of thumb. Other words that have been flagged in society include freshman, victim, survivor, addict, disabled person, policeman, and many others.
I believe we should be sensitive to words that could be harmful to another person. But I would also agree with Erwin Lutzer that PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) goes too far because it wants baseball to ban the word “bullpen” out of a consideration for the bovine species.
Word suppression leads to verbal suppression and self-censorship. One survey discovered that nearly two-thirds (62%) of Americans said that “the political climate today keeps them from expressing their beliefs.” An even higher percentage (77%) of conservatives “feel compelled to keep their beliefs to themselves.”
We should support free speech and criticize attempts to suppress speech through speech codes or social intimidation.