Viewpoints with Kerby Anderson

Kerby Anderson
This week is the Democratic Convention, and more Americans will be paying attention to the upcoming elections. The Olympics are over, and that means that many will be tuning in to learn more about the candidates. So far, the press hasn’t been asking many questions of substance or even been allowed to ask many questions. Here are three principles for you that all start with the letter P.
The first P is personality. In an ideal world, we would love to have a governor or a member of Congress or a president who is warm, humble, and likeable. Some are, but most aren’t. Ambitious and driven people are the people most likely to win elective office.
That is why we need to focus on the second P that is policy. What policies will this candidate promote and implement? This is what will ultimately affect your family, your church, and society. Fortunately, there are voter guides and party platforms you can and should consult.
Yes, political platforms often have vague language and platitudes. But there are also dozens and dozens of specific policy recommendations. Does the candidate agree with those policies? If not, why not? In the case of the presidential candidates, both campaigns this year have been quite involved in crafting the party platforms.
A third P is personnel. If you are voting for a candidate in an executive position, you should also evaluate who they will appoint to help them achieve their agenda. The president, for example, can appoint 3,000-5,000 personnel in the executive branch. Each of the presidential candidates has picked a vice-presidential running mate. Who he or she picks provides a window to the type of person who will be in their administration. As the adage goes, personnel are policy.
Although there is lots of talk about personalities right now, policy and personnel are more important in choosing a candidate.

Penna Dexter
Last year, to coincide with Labor Day, Senator Marco Rubio’s office issued a report entitled, “The State of the Working (and Non-Working) Man.” Labor Day 2024 comes amidst presidential campaigns in which the American working class is a key constituency.
Senator Rubio’s report lays some groundwork by stating that “prime age men who are not in the labor force report feeling sad and purposeless at much higher rates than men with jobs.” These men spend more time alone than those who are working. More than two thirds of these non-working men “have never married” and nearly “a third live with their parents.” Almost half of them take painkillers daily. “And they are more likely to take their own lives.”
The report points out that “working men face a crisis of their own: their outcomes and prospects in work, education and family life are dimmer than their fathers” because “they face an economy and society that no longer rewards their efforts the way they once did.”
The report cites several contributing factors: One is “mass immigration.” Another is  deindustrialization with manufacturing being replaced by a “service economy.” Writer and consultant Aaron Renn publishes a Substack newsletter which tackles challenges unique to men in our society. Mr. Renn says that although Senator Rubio supports working to reindustrialize America, it’s not a panacea. He says this report wisely avoids overpromising what can be accomplished by reindustrialization.
We need more men in what the report calls “protector” professions like policing, border patrol, and the military — areas where, arguably, expansion is needed anyway.
The report recommends eliminating the marriage penalty in federal assistance programs.  And it wisely recommends making it mandatory that able-bodied men be actively looking for work in order to receive any public benefits.
Some of the report’s recommendations unwisely expand government. We must  adopt common-sense policies that encourage men to work — and to become independent, marry, and form families.

Kerby Anderson
Professor Paul Kengor argues that “You Can Never Have Enough Kids.” He was on my radio program last week to talk about his article.
He confronts what he calls the mindless cliché of our culture: Wait until you have enough money to have kids. He hears it regurgitated by young couples all the time. He then takes the time to calmly ask them a few questions.
“How many kids did your grandparents have? How about your great-grandparents when they came to America dirt poor on packed ships headed to Ellis Island?” When they acknowledge that those ancestors had a bunch of kids, he then asks them: “How much money did they have?”
He has found that the young man or woman is usually taken aback. They haven’t heard that from the culture. They know their ancestors had no money but raised large, intact families and stayed married. In fact, they wouldn’t be alive today without those ancestors bestowing the gifts of life.
He also asks a follow-up question: “How much money will be enough before having that kid? How much cash should be shoveled into this child’s materialistically ideal existence?” People who focus on having enough money will find they will never have enough.
On the radio program, Paul Kengor also reminded us that the greatest gift you can give your child is a sibling. When people find out how many kids his wife and he have, they say, “One kid has been hard enough for us!” His response is that one kid is harder, but two kids are easier. The one child gets a playmate other than you. He explained that when he had only one child, he had to come home and play Legos for several hours. When the second boy came along, he had boundless energy and was all in.
We need messages like this in a culture that doesn’t seem to value children anymore.

Kerby Anderson
We have another example of the growing surveillance state. This comes from the revelation that the Securities and Exchange Commission is completing a database of all Americans’ stock and equity transactions and portfolios. It will track investments in real time.
Some experts have expressed concerns. Former US Attorney General Bill Barr says the database presents a “huge concern.” In a recent interview, Barr explained, “you could have someone at the SEC say, ‘Let me check out this person and see if I can find something on them.’” He argued that this database of all American’s stock and equity transaction information would allow SEC employees to go on “fishing expeditions.”
This may be the first you have heard of this. Fortunately, former vice president Mike Pence’s organization, Advancing American Freedom (AAF), is attempting to raise awareness.
How do we lose our privacy? We lose it bit by bit, always with the justification that it is being done for our own good. In my booklet on “Digital Surveillance,” I document how both big government and big business are collecting massive amounts of data on us and how it can be used against us.
More than a decade ago, the SEC decided to build a giant database to capture trades. Then it just grew and grew. And critics say the SEC avoided congressional scrutiny by putting pressure on self-regulating organizations.
A few members of Congress and a coalition of conservative policy experts signed a letter expressing concern about the project. They predict the database upon completion “would be the world’s largest database outside of the National Security Agency.”
This is how government grows and how we lose our privacy.

Kerby Anderson
When I talk about the US national debt, often someone asks: Why can’t we just cancel the debt? People do this with bankruptcy. Why can’t the government do the same?
The US currently has a $35 trillion national debt plus $217 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Government debt is issued by the US Treasury, through what are called US Treasuries. When you purchase a T-bill, it shows up in your bank account or brokerage account as an asset. The US owes $6 trillion in T-bills, $14 trillion in T-notes, and $4.5 trillion in T-bonds.
Why not just cancel all debt? Debt is a liability that the US government owes someone. Your elderly parents or grandparents probably own some T-bills. This government debt is an asset for them.
If you cancel all the US government debt, then those T-bills would be worthless. They can’t buy groceries or pay for utilities or medical care. Cancelling US Government debt would instantly impoverish millions of Americans, most of whom are retired.
These treasuries also may be sitting on the balance sheet of an insurance company that will need the money to pay out future claims. They are also sitting on the balance sheet of other countries. For example, Japan has $1.1 trillion, and China has $768 billion.
Even if we could cancel the debt, it would have no impact on this country’s unfunded liabilities. These are future promises that will need to be paid out and will eventually convert into debt and be held on the US government’s balance sheet. That is additional debt dumped on future generations.
This is why we cannot cancel the US debt.

Kerby Anderson
One of the attacks on the Trump campaign is to whip up voter fears about Project 2025. Kamala Harris said this on the campaign trail: “I will do everything in my power to unite the Democratic Party–and unite our nation–to defeat Donald Trump and his extreme Project 2025 agenda.” Her campaign website claims that Project 2025 will “strip away our freedoms” and “abolish checks and balances.”
Project 2025 is a 922-page document created through the Heritage Foundation by 400 experts. It is essentially a conservative wish list of policy initiatives these experts would like implemented. When asked about it, Donald Trump said he had not read it and it doesn’t represent his policy goals.
More recently, the leader of the project (Paul Dans) stepped down from the project. One of the Trump campaign advisors applauded the action and proclaimed: “Reports of Project 2025’s demise would be greatly welcomed.”
Although the document touches on just about every aspect of the federal government, it appears that the greatest concern from Kamala Harris and other Democrats is the section on how to rein in the administrative state. Although a Trump administration would like to reform the civil service system so it would be easier to remove some governmental workers, I think it unlikely any meaningful reform will occur. I think American voters should welcome more accountability from unelected bureaucrats, but few in Congress seem ready for such reform.
Another attack on Project 2025 is the fallacious argument that it would radically change Social Security. Donald Trump has made it clear he has no desire to reform Social Security or any other entitlement.
Scaring people about Project 2025 may be an effective campaign strategy, but it isn’t based on reality.

Kerby Anderson
As you may have heard, President Biden wants to change the Supreme Court. This latest desperate attempt at “court packing” will not succeed, but it’s worth discussing as a teachable moment. In his op-ed, the president proclaimed, “I am calling for three bold reforms to restore trust and accountability to the court and our democracy.” One of his proposals is 18-year term limits for justices.
The Founding Fathers gave Supreme Court justices lifetime tenure while serving with good behavior. They did so to assure justices had independence from political whims. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist Paper #78 that “This independence of the judges is equally requisite to guard the Constitution and the rights of individuals” and would protect them from “serious oppressions of the minor party.”
Kelly Shackelford (First Liberty Institute) quotes Joe Biden, who in 1983 said that court packing “was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make. And it put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body” which is the Supreme Court. He says Biden was right back in 1983 and wrong today.
His organization had put together a nationwide coalition of nearly a half million patriots who plan to flood Congress and the White House with this critical message: NO to court packing, NO to the liberal agenda, NO to a Supreme Court Coup.
Kristen Waggoner (Alliance Defending Freedom) also warns, “Don’t be fooled. This move by President Biden has nothing to do with protecting the court and has everything to do with the Left’s desire to dominate every institution in society.”
These proposals have little chance of succeeding since they need an amendment to the Constitution. That requires a supermajority of Congress and ratification by three-fourth of the states.
Fortunately, none of these so-called “reforms” will be enacted.

Penna Dexter
It would be nice if we could count on the medical community to emphasize excellence and evidence over woke ideology. When we learn of transgender interventions, including life-altering surgery, being prescribed as standard protocol for young people struggling with mental health conditions, we’re wondering where the sane doctors are.
Thankfully, there are still doctors making the case for protecting children against radical transgender ideology.  In a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, physician Travis Morrell filed a resolution with the Colorado Medical Society “based on the rise of transgender medical interventions both in Colorado and around the nation.”
In doing so, Dr. Morrell is drawing upon the Colorado Medical Society’s policy opposing genital mutilation. He points out that “transgender surgeries often involve mutilation.” Dr. Morrell began his medical career in gynecology and says that transgender treatments “can ruin healthy sexual function and damage reproductive ability, potentially leading to a lifetime of physical and mental ailments.” His fellow members of the society overwhelmingly stood with him.
Dr. Morrell’s resolution came before the general membership in mid-May. Members were given four weeks to vote on it and as the votes came in, passage looked likely. “But,” Dr. Morrell wrote, “by June 12 — the day before voting ended — the tide had dramatically turned, thanks to a sudden influx of votes by medical students.”
It turns out that an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine asked the medical students to quickly join the Colorado Medical Society and vote against Dr. Morrell’s resolution. One hundred fifty of them did, resulting in its rejection.
Dr. Morrell is disappointed that the students so easily switched away from supporting his protective referendum, instead siding with “unproven, unethical and unscientific medical interventions.”
He’s right to conclude that “Americans should worry that when today’s trainees become tomorrow’s doctors, they’ll put political activism ahead of patient health.”

Kerby Anderson
Most Christians do not have a biblical worldview. That has been well documented in numerous studies. This is puzzling since a significant percentage of Christians without a biblical worldview regularly attend church services. A recent study by George Barna may have an answer.
Put simply, church members don’t have a biblical worldview because the pastor does not have a biblical worldview. Less than a third (31%) of pastors in America have a biblical worldview. That is a shocking percentage.
One pastor told George Barna that may not be too shocking considering that many pastors of liberal churches would not have an orthodox view. But he went on to say that what would be shocking is if the percentages were low among evangelical pastors. The most recent poll shows that a bare majority of evangelical pastors (51%) and only about a third (36%) of charismatic or Pentecostal pastors have a biblical worldview. He also found that less than one in ten (9%) of pastors in traditionally black churches have a biblical worldview.
Another interesting correlation was the relationship between worldview and church size. Generally, the smaller congregations are more likely than the larger congregations to have a biblical worldview. More than four in ten (41%-45%) of the pastors of churches with smaller congregations have a biblical worldview. By contrast, only 15 percent of pastors in churches with more than 250 adults have a biblical worldview.
George Barna explained that pastors who fill the position of Teaching Pastor or Executive Pastor usually had the lowest scores. These positions are found most often in larger churches.
His survey breaks down pastors according to denomination, according to church size, and according to congregational ethnicity. None of the percentages are encouraging and are a reminder that we need to be discerning when choosing a church.

Kerby Anderson
Why do we write down our laws? I recently read an article providing a practical reason for writing down the laws of a nation, but I would also like to add one historical reason for why we write down our laws.
This country is supposed to be a nation of laws and not men. We haven’t always lived up to the vision, but that is what we are to aspire to achieve. When you write down a law, you give it a fixed meaning. A government with laws with precise meanings is a government of law not of arbitrary power. You know what rights the government acknowledges, and you know what prohibitions will be punished.
In my booklet A Biblical Point of View on Constitutional Interpretation, I talk about two different views. Originalism attempts to understand the mindset of the framers who constructed it. That is why some have referred to this view as “strict constructionism.” The other view is modernism, also often called “the living Constitution.” It attempts to find meaning for the Constitution today and rejects attempts to view it through the eyes of white men who lived in the 18th century. Ultimately, rights and legal definitions become putty in the hands of judges and justices.
Historically, we write down laws because of the Puritans. They wrote out their covenants because they understood that they were to answer to God for their actions. These covenants bound each person to another person and the whole community as an agreement under God. They also understood that the rights they enjoyed came from God. Ultimately, these Puritan Covenants became a model for the US Constitution.
Americans want to live under a government of law, not a government where justices find principles in the unwritten “penumbras” of a living Constitution. Laws are written down to fix their meanings and protect against judges and justices who want to change the law arbitrarily.

Kerby Anderson
You have probably heard the phrase, “History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes.” That observation is true, especially in economics.
Investor Ray Dalio learned that lesson at a young age. In 1971, he was clerking on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. When President Nixon announced that paper currency could no longer be turned in for gold, he expected pandemonium on the floor as stocks took a dive. Instead, the stock market jumped 4 percent as the dollar plummeted. He was surprised because he hadn’t experienced a currency devaluation, but he would have known if he had studied history.
This isn’t the first time the US has had to deal with significant inflation. In fact, the current chairman of the Federal Reserve (Jerome Powell) vows that he won’t make the mistake of Arthur Burns, who was Fed chairman in the 1970s.
I recently read an article from a Yale economics professor who was at the Federal Reserve back in those days. He said Arthur Burns wanted to remove energy-related products from the Consumer Price Index (CPI) because of the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent oil embargo. Blaming oil prices on a war. Does that sound familiar?
Then came surging food prices. Arthur Burns argued that this was traceable to unusual weather (specifically an El Niño event) that affected such things as fertilizers and feedstock prices. He, therefore, wanted to remove food prices from the CPI. Again, doesn’t this sound familiar?
By the time he was done, only about 35 percent of the CPI was left. If you have been listening to my commentaries for any length of time, you know that we no longer measure CPI the way we did decades ago.
This isn’t the first time America has had to deal with significant inflation, and we can learn lessons from economic history about what we should do.

Kerby Anderson
A few decades ago, Americans were increasingly concerned about privacy. Back then, we did several radio programs on the topic but now many of our privacy concerns have faded.
Mark Zuckerberg put this in perspective. He said when he got to his dorm room at Harvard, the question many students asked was, “why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?” He then went on to acknowledge that people (especially his generation) became more comfortable with sharing information online.
In his book, Why Privacy Matters, Neil Richards writes about some of the myths that surround privacy concerns. One myth is that privacy is about hiding dark secrets. We hear the argument that “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” But that doesn’t mean we should have everyone see everything. We wear clothes out of modesty. We don’t want videos of what we do in a bathroom or bedroom.
Another myth is that privacy isn’t about creepiness. He provides lots of examples of privacy invasions we would not tolerate. Yet we have the famous comment by Google’s Eric Schmidt that I have mentioned in previous commentaries. He explained that: “Google’s policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”
Another myth is that privacy isn’t primarily about control. We are assured that we can make informed choices about the amount of information a technology company can use. But do you really read all the words in a privacy notice? One famous study from more than a decade ago estimated that if we were to quickly read the privacy policies of every website we encounter, it would take 75 full working days to read them all.
Privacy concerns still exist, and we need to focus on them in the future.

Kerby Anderson
After a mass shooting, one question rarely asked is whether there is any connection to psychiatric drugs. As I have explained in previous commentaries, there are many factors and explanations for young men who decide to shoot innocent citizens. There is no “one size fits all” explanation.
It’s worth a brief mention that many of these young men were on what are called SSRI drugs. That stands for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Correlation is not causation, but we can’t ignore that the significant increase in mass murders and suicides does correlate with the same increase in the use of these psychotropic drugs.
Just a casual search on the shooters surfaces a common pattern. So many of them were on one or more of these SSRI drugs. We have learned about the video games and movies the Columbine shooter watched but hear much less about the two drugs he was on. We have heard about the racist ideas of the young man who shot up the church in Charleston, but we have heard much less about the drug he was on.
I recently talked about the lost boys of America. We need a national conversation about why we are seeing so many mentally disturbed young men. Loneliness and isolation are an issue. Broken homes, bullying, violent video games, and several other factors contribute. But we need to add the possibility that these drugs are also a factor.
The Journal of Political Psychology put together a list of numerous mass shootings committed by young men on prescription drugs. At the least, there seems to be a correlation that is worthy of further research.
Lots of factors feed into these horrible mass shootings. Drug use by these shooters is another factor worth considering.

Penna Dexter
The prominent role played by drag queens in the opening ceremonies for the Paris Olympics, was created to display France’s inclusivity and showcase the French LGBTQ+ community. James Leperlier, president of a group called Inter-LGBT, says the transgender community “has difficulty being heard.”
He told ABC news, “we are far from what the ceremony showed. There’s much progress to do in society regarding transgender people.”
Is it progress to offend Christians all over the world who are watching the Olympics?
The program’s parody of the Last Supper featured 18 drag queens and dancers posing behind a long table with the Seine and Eiffel Tower in the background. It mocks a central event of Christianity. The Last Supper was Christ’s final meal with his 12 disciples, when He instituted holy communion.
The ceremonies’ director, Thomas Jolly, previewed the opening in an interview with British Vogue. Mr. Jolly, who is gay, said his measure for the production’s success is “if everyone feels represented by it.”
Everyone?
Not according to best-selling author and cultural commentator Rod Dreher. “Right,” he responded, “except for Christians, whose most sacred moments must be mocked for the sake of queer inclusion.”
American Catholic Bishop Robert Baron, founder of Word on Fire ministries, has lived in Paris. He wonders: “Would they ever have dared mock Islam in a similar way?”
Arsonists are burning down churches all over France. As Rod Dreher points out, “Mosques are going up in France at the same rate that churches are coming down.”
“And yet,” he writes, “the contemptible elites who rule France stage this kind of blasphemous spectacle, attacking the ancestral faith of France, and what Christians still remain there.”
Christianity is declining in the West. Normally, when LGBT interests are elevated, Christianity loses. It’s becoming apparent that Christians are no longer welcome in this culture.
Rod Dreher concludes, “The Enemy knows what time it is.”
Do we?

Kerby Anderson
Yesterday, I talked about robots and wanted to follow up with some perspective on how artificial intelligence represents independent thinking and autonomous actions. There are reasons to believe that AI and robots will be learning and thinking in ways we might not predict. Let me illustrate this with the game Go.
Go is an ancient East Asian game played on a nineteen-by-nineteen grid with black and white stones. The goal is to surround your opponent’s stones with yours. Once you do that, you take them off the board. It is more complex than chess. After a few moves, there are 200 quadrillion (2 x 1015) possible configurations.
When computers beat chess masters, they used a brute force method (where they merely crunch through all sorts of possible moves). That is not possible with Go. Therefore, engineers produced AlphaGo to learn by watching 150,000 games played by human experts. Then it played against copies of itself.
The engineers then organized a tournament in South Korea against the world champion of Go. AlphaGo won the first game, but it was the second game that had everyone talking. The machine made a series of moves that made no sense. Commentators explained to the people watching that it was “a strange move” and that AlphaGo had made “a mistake.”
But the world champion knew something wasn’t right. He took a very long time before he took his next move. Before long, it was obvious that AlphaGo had won again and Go strategy had been rewritten right before everyone’s eyes.
Later versions essentially dispensed with human knowledge and developed their own strategies and thinking. This illustrates the power and the peril of artificial intelligence.

Kerby Anderson
If you mention the term “killer robots,” people are likely to think of the Terminator movies. But these are real and will change the nature of warfare.
Mustafa Suleyman devotes a section to “robots with guns” in his book, The Coming Wave. He tells the story of an attack on a heavily guarded Iranian convoy that came from a nearby empty pickup truck outfitted with a gun. It was fired by a “high-tech, computerized sharpshooter kitted out with artificial intelligence and multiple-camera-eyes, operated via satellite.” Although a human authorized the strike, it was the AI that fired the weapon and automatically adjusted the gun’s aim.
In the future, imagine robots equipped with facial recognition and automatic weapons. That may seem like science fiction, but military drones firing missiles at the enemy is fact. Soon they will become autonomous drones that don’t even need human interaction.
Paul Wood proclaims that “The Killer Robots Are Coming.” He is concerned that the “dangerous marriage between AI and robotics is already happening, creating autonomous killing machines that can work with little or no human oversight.”
He describes a Ukrainian drone company that claimed it had deployed a fully autonomous weapon that used AI to decide on its own when to shoot and whom to kill. In South Korea, guard robots on its border have the capability to detect, track and fire on intruders without humans giving commands.
Of even greater concern is the possibility that a nuclear weapon could be deployed by artificial intelligence. He suspects that Russia and China may already have automation where early-warning systems trigger a reflex to launch missiles in return.
Killer robots are no longer merely the stuff of science fiction.

Kerby Anderson
The Wall Street Journal editorial board begins with this observation: “The laws of economics continue to exist even when politicians ignore them.” What they are talking about is the decision in California to increase the fast-food minimum wage to $20 an hour. When the editors predicted the inevitable outcome, the governor’s office claimed they were “pushing a false narrative.” Now reality has set in, and the predictions have come true.
Over the years, I have written commentaries about progressive attempts in cities like Seattle and Portland to raise the minimum wage significant amounts. The results are always the same. Some benefit, but most others do not. Owners cut back the number of workers and the number of hours for those who remain. And prices go up. California is no different.
“An Associated Press dispatch last week reported that California fast-food franchises have been cutting worker hours after the wage mandate took effect…. A Del Taco manager slashed the number of workers for each shift by half. A Jersey Mike’s franchise owner reduced morning and evening shifts, reduced his staff by 20 workers, and raised prices.”
The greatest harm is to those who lose their jobs. Research done by Beacon Economics recently found that California’s minimum wage law, “does particular harm to teenagers. In the past two years, unemployment among 16-to-19-year-olds nearly doubled.” As the editors noted, “Instead of flipping burgers, more California teens will be flipping through TikTok videos.”
Think of your first few jobs. Like me, your only job skills were a strong back and a good work ethic. We probably weren’t worth $20 an hour, but we did learn from skills that have made us successful today. Many young people won’t get that opportunity because of this law.

Kerby Anderson
One of my recent in-studio guests had a rags-to-riches story that was one more example of achieving the American dream, like the one we heard recently for J.D. Vance. My guest attributed his success to education and is a strong proponent of the American educational system. But he also acknowledged that education in America faces many challenges.
Earlier this year, I wrote a commentary about the 1983 assessment of American education from the National Commission on Excellence in Education. The panel lamented: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.”
Forty years later, the state of education in America seems worse even though we spend more on education per capita than just about any other country in the world. Not so long ago, the US was producing the best and brightest students in the world. Now, they are about average in science and reading and below average in math.
As a nation, we don’t even know our history or basic political facts. A study done by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation discovered that only one in three (36%) Americans could pass the U.S. citizenship test.
During the recent Republican National Convention, we heard many speakers suggest school choice might be a solution. At a previous Republican Convention, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice observed that, “when I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, we’ve got a real problem.” It is unlikely that school choice will be mentioned positively in the upcoming Democratic National Convention.
An important issue in this election is how we can meet the education challenges before us.

Kerby Anderson
Over a week ago, I talked about the dangers of alcohol. We know so much more about its dangers than we did just a few decades ago. This is also true of cannabis.
A few months ago, I quoted from a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School who put together a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses for the World Health Organization. There are several US government organizations and experts who also document the dangers of cannabis.
The National Safety Council warns that marijuana has a negative impact on job safety. It is a leading indicator of workplace accidents. It affects depth perception, reaction time, coordination, and other motor skills. It creates sensory distortion. For someone operating machinery, these effects can be deadly.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, employees who tested positive for marijuana had 55 percent more industrial accidents, 85 percent more injuries, and 75 percent greater absenteeism compared to those who tested negative.
The National Institutes of Health have reported, “Young men with cannabis (marijuana) use disorder have an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.” This conclusion came from the detailed study of “health records data spanning 5 decades and representing more than 6 million people.”
I remember when many years ago, I had an author on my radio program who documented the link between cannabis and schizophrenia. I received complaints from some in the audience about his statement. We now have solid evidence of that potential danger.
Cannabis is not as harmless as promoters of drug legalization would have us believe. This is another case of “the more we learn, the more we learn of its dangers.”

Penna Dexter
Normal Americans are repulsed by the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. This was a bridge too far even for people who buy in to careless “threat to democracy” rhetoric from Trump’s opposition. Their recoil reminds us that we must take care to preserve our constitutional republic.
Our system of government is meant to help our nation avoid political violence. Under constitutionalism, we have systems that allow differences of opinion on government policy to be handled by negotiation and at the voting booth.
A prominent constitutional scholar says the escalation of political violence in the last 15 years has tested the bounds of constitutionalism “pretty aggressively.”
Yuval Levin (Yoo-vuhl Leh-vn) is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and  Editor at National Affairs and The New Atlantis. In an essay for The Free Press, Dr. Levin says the nearly-successful attempt to take out “a once and perhaps future president“ is far from a natural next step from the violence and threats of violence against public officials we’ve been seeing in recent years. He says “this moment feels like a sharp break” that “gave us a terrible glimpse of what it would be like to live beyond the bounds of our constitutional republic.”
Within a constitutional republic our differences may be stark, but there are institutions in which those disputes can be settled “through competition and negotiation.” Dr. Levin points out that, in a constitutional republic, there’s a prevailing assumption that our political victories and defeats are temporary and that the people on the other side of our political disputes “aren’t going away.”
Step outside of constitutionalism and you have “a realm of violence and pain” where “there is no expectation that the people we disagree with today will be here tomorrow and have to be accommodated somehow.”
As Dr. Levin points out, Our constitutional system exists to help us “disagree well.” We must put a stop to its degradation.