Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Tomorrow is the 4th of July, and I thought I would take a moment to talk about the origin of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson said that many of the ideas in the Declaration came from John Locke. Jefferson also gave credit to the writer Algernon Sidney, who in turn cites most prominently Aristotle, Plato, Roman republican writers, and the Old Testament. Legal scholar Gary Amos argues that Locke’s Two Treatises on Government is simply Samuel…

Kerby Anderson As we approach the traditional time in America in which we celebrate its independence, it’s worth considering the two types of political society that we can find in the world. The first is what we celebrate. We begin with the idea that government is instituted by human beings to provide liberty and security. We need enough government to ensure that we are safe. But we don’t want so much government that we lose our freedom. Ben Shapiro talks…

Kerby Anderson It’s easy to make it onto a liberal blacklist. I discovered that years ago. Disagree with even one plank of the latest politically correct platform, and you make the liberal blacklist. But even liberal people with progressive ideas are finding that you can make the blacklist even if your disagreement should be considered minor. Just ask JK Rowling, famous author of the Harry Potter book series. She ended up on the blacklist for taking issue with an article…

Kerby Anderson Recently the president of iVoterGuide explained on my radio program how COVID shows how elections matter. Debbie Wuthnow said that COVID reminds us that elected officials can make life and death decisions. It may be tempting to think that elections are “just politics.” We learned from the various orders and pronouncements by our elected officials that they have significant power over our lives. She also argued that COVID revealed how vulnerable our religious liberties are. Some elected officials…

Kerby Anderson Perhaps you have heard the phrase that people follow their basic principles, until they don’t. As much as most of us try to follow key principles in our life (whether they be principles of leadership, family, or morality), sometimes an issue arises that changes our behavior. That is certainly true of judicial interpretation. While on the Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch has staked out his belief that legislatures (not the judiciary) should make law. And he has on…

Penna Dexter The extensive looting and rioting piggybacking on the peaceful protests in response to the death of George Floyd are disastrously counterproductive. Criminals and extremists are piling up damages that will result in costs to minority communities — communities they claim to represent — for years to come. Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Riley provides some history to show that peaceful civil rights demonstrations get better results. He points out that two consequential laws affecting African Americans, the Civil…

Kerby Anderson We are a divided country, but it may be worse than we imagined. An article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discussed what is called “motive attribution asymmetry.” That’s a technical term for the assumption that your ideology is based on love and your opponent’s is based on hate. Put another way: we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys. They discovered that the average Republican and the average Democrat today are as…

Kerby Anderson You have heard most of them before. They are little phrases and one-liners that Christians (and even non-Christians) say in order to encourage you. You might be going through some tough struggles, and they remind you, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” At a funeral for a child, someone will likely explain, “God gained another angel.” And of course, there are the millions of people who believe that “God just wants you to be happy”…

Kerby Anderson In a PragerU video, former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper talked about two different types of people. He described these two groups in order to explain why Donald Trump won in 2016. I will ignore his explanation and conclusion in this short commentary in order to focus on the impact of two people groups. He says there are many people who “can live anywhere” and many more people who have to “live somewhere.” David Goodhart makes this important…

Kerby Anderson Americans currently promoting socialism tell us that we shouldn’t look at the failed socialist experiments in Cuba or Venezuela. Instead, we should look at Sweden as proof that socialism works and can bring great prosperity. That’s not what Swedish historian Johan Norberg says. He is featured in a new documentary, “Sweden: Lessons for America.” John Stossel also interviewed Norberg for Stossel TV. Norberg makes it clear that “Sweden is not socialist—because the government doesn’t own the means of…

Kerby Anderson A new documentary reminds us how intrusive social media can be in our lives and how personal privacy is quickly vanishing. Kyle Smith writes about this in a recent op-ed and mentions the documentary The Creepy Line. The name of the documentary is taken from a comment by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. He has a nickname for the invasive nature of his company. “Google policy on a lot of these things is to get right up to the…