For two months I've written about candidates, court rulings, riots, and ballots. Underneath nearly all of it sits one question, bigger than any single race.
What is a human being?
Marxism says a person is a member of a class, an oppressor or the oppressed, owed something or owing it. The newer progressive creed says a person is whatever he feels himself to be this week, and everyone around him, parents included, must affirm it. The faith that shaped this country says something older. Every person is made in the image of God, carries a dignity no government granted and none can revoke, and is meant to work, love, and answer for what he does.
That isn't an abstraction on Election Day. It's on your ballot.
Start with the economy. Marxism's promise has never changed: somebody else is the reason you're struggling, and the state will fix it by taking from them and handing to you. It sounds like justice. In practice, it has meant the Soviet famines, Mao's Great Leap Forward, which starved tens of millions, Cuba's permanent rationing, and a Venezuela that went from one of Latin America's richest nations to one that millions of its citizens fled. Every time, it began with the same word: fair.
Now it arrives in a friendlier font. The Democratic Socialists of America, whose candidates have been winning Democratic primaries, run on a platform that would abolish ICE and the Senate, subordinate the presidency and the Supreme Court to Congress, and defund police toward abolition. Ask the people cheering trillion-dollar promises how they'll pay for them, and the answer is always the same: make the rich pay their fair share. That isn't a plan. It's a slogan wearing a plan's clothes.
One Senate nominee went further, floating a constitutional change that would swap the right to bear arms for a right to healthcare. Not a new benefit. A trade. Surrender the liberty, receive the promise. That's the whole bargain in one sentence, and history says the liberty rarely comes back.
Then there are the children.
A 15-year-old girl in Massachusetts was separated from her parents and her brother this fall. They are Catholic. A school counselor began treating her as a boy without telling them. They objected. The father was accused of abuse, the allegation was found unfounded, and the state kept guardianship anyway. A judge temporarily blocked hormone treatment while the case continued.
In Texas, Senate candidate James Talarico has called parents who won't affirm a child's gender identity "abusive," and voted against a bill that would have shielded those parents from abuse and neglect findings for declining.
Nobody is arguing for indifference to a hurting child. I've sat up at 2 AM with one. The question is who decides, and how fast. When a 14-year-old is certain of something a 24-year-old won't remember believing, the loving answer is sometimes "wait." A party that treats "wait" as hatred and the parents who say it as suspects have forgotten whom children belong to. They aren't the property of counselors, schools, or the state. They're entrusted to the people who love them most.
Then there's order. California tried to force plainclothes federal agents to identify themselves by name, and even the Ninth Circuit said no. Across Europe this autumn, France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, and Albania were filled with riot police and burning cars, with nearly a thousand French officers injured. Countries that lose the will to enforce their own laws and borders don't become gentler. They become louder, and then violent. And elections only work when voters can trust them, which means verified rolls, citizenship checked, and officials who answer questions instead of resenting them.
I'm not writing against people. I'm writing against ideas. Some of my friends hold them, good-hearted people who've confused compassion with surrendering their judgment. You can have a good heart and still have catastrophically bad ideas.
So choose better. Choose work that pays and is honored. Energy that's abundant. Borders that mean something and police who are thanked, not targeted. Schools that tell parents the truth. A Constitution nobody trades for a promise. And a country that says to every child: you are made in the image of God, you are loved, and you do not have to rush.
Then vote. Not someday. On Election Day. If you've sat out midterms before, this is the one. No single election saves a republic, and I've told you that all fall. Republics are kept by people who show up, again and again, and refuse to surrender common sense.
Vote. Bring a neighbor. Then pray, and get back to the work of loving your family, your neighbors, and your country.
Home of the brave was never a slogan. It was a job description.