I Believe

This story is true. Except for the parts with the ghosts. [SFX: Theater applause] Dim the lights. Prologue. London. December, 1776. One lone leaf on the London plane outside the King’s window trembles in the light breeze, like the whole city just let out a quiet breath. It had clung to its branch through the long autumn, through winds that had stripped its companions and sent them spinning across...

2025. The president fires an FTC commissioner before her term is up . The statute says he can’t without cause. He does it anyway. Now the Supreme Court has to decide whether ninety years of precedent was real law, or a bluff. Act I. The Wager [SFX: casino room, cards dealt, chips stacked, ice clinking in glasses] Players stare at each other across a poker table. Four cards are up. One card is face...

Act I. The Sky War SFX: Thunder rolling in the distance. A slow rotor hum. Laos. March 20th, 1967 . A C-130 Hercules lifts off from Udon Royal Thai Air Force Base just after sunset. The crew has the cargo bay loaded with canisters. Not bombs, not supplies; canisters of silver iodide mixed with lead iodide and acetone. Command briefed the crew separately from every other unit on base. The flight pl...

Act I. The Golden Handcuffs (SFX: Blizzard wind.) January 1914. Highland Park, Michigan. Six degrees above zero. Ten thousand men press against the iron gates of the Ford Motor Company . Wool coats thin as paper. Broken boots stamping frozen mud. The guards inside are terrified. The mob is too large, so they turn the fire hoses on them. The water hits. Soaks through. Freezes instantly to ice on th...

Act One. The Penny Auctions Nebraska, October 6, 1932. Five and a half miles southwest of Elgin, in the middle of farm country. Theresa Von Baum, a widow who worked her 80-acre farm with only the help of her sons after her husband’s death, couldn’t make the payment on her $442 mortgage. The bank moved to foreclose . The bank expected to make hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars for the farm. Ne...

Act 1. Andrew Carnegie It’s 1892. Homestead, Pennsylvania. Andrew Carnegie pays his steelworkers an average of $1.68 a day. About $56 in today’s money . Twelve-hour shifts. Six days a week. The workers and their families shared rooms that smelled like smoke and steel dust. The beds were never cold because workers on different shifts all used them. They ate bread, onions, sometimes meat. The lucky...

Act 1. The First Food Stamp Scene One: May, 1939. The Machinist and the Surplus On the morning of May 16, 1939, Ralston Thayer stood first in line at Rochester, New York’s old post office . He was thirty-five years old. A machinist. A veteran of the Great War. He had been out of work for nearly a year. Newspaper reporters crowded around him. Photographers jockeyed for position. Thayer was making h...

A president offers to buy beef from a country we just bailed out. Argentina. American ranchers call it betrayal. Economists say it won’t lower prices. Everyone calls it stupid. But that same country just sold seven million tons of soybeans to China instead of us. And three-quarters of their beef exports go to China. And we just gave them twenty billion dollars. And their president is our president...

A successful elk season has come and gone. Elk season isn’t just about the harvest, or packing heavy loads out of the mountains, though those activities are often involved. Elk season is communion. With the mountain, and with each other. It’s a time of remembrance. Checking on kids and wives. Eating and drinking together. You might hunt with someone you see often, or someone you haven’t seen in te...

The Chicken Tax Scene. It’s 1962. American farmers have cracked the code. We can raise chickens cheap. Like, really cheap. Industrial-scale factory farms, efficient as hell. We start shipping frozen chickens to Europe by the boatload. German housewives love it. French families love it. Half the price of local chicken. Maybe even tastier! European chicken farmers do not love it. They’re getting des...

The Six-Hour Bomb: When Alexander Hamilton Almost Killed the Constitution June 18, 1787 . Philadelphia. The temperature in the Pennsylvania State House had already hit 85 degrees. Fifty-five men in wool coats and powdered wigs sat trapped in a room with the windows nailed shut and doors guarded for secrecy. The delegates chose privacy over performance so they could speak freely. They had been argu...

October 17, 1933. New York Harbor Albert Einstein stepped off a passenger ship at the Port of New York , carrying two suitcases and a violin case. He and his wife, Elsa, had fled Nazi Germany. His books were being burned. There was a bounty on his head: one million dollars . He had to flee. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered him refuge. American universities, includ...

On September 10th, a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah. The event reminds us that no one should die over speech, and that we must wrestle with big questions calmly. You don’t have to love him or hate him. At times, his message resonated with many across America. At times, it divided us. If we say we disagree with his points, we should be able to make the case. If we can’t, his spears carry weight...

Joel Douglas (00:03) My guest today is Shaka Mitchell, a senior fellow for the American Federation for Children, a Nashville-based attorney, a Belmont adjunct teaching constitutional law, and a leader dedicated to transforming education for underserved families. He’s a featured guest on TEDx Nashville and podcasts like The Learning Curve and Charterfolk . The charter schools Shaka has worked with...

Should Public Money for Schools Guarantee More Than Learning? This week, the National School Lunch Program, born out of national defense, and the rise of homeschooling vouchers, where freedom meets responsibility. And next week, we’ll dig even deeper with our guest, Shaka Mitchell! But for now … the lights are dimming. Look! There's the curtain! Scene One. Frontier America, 1809 Education, even wi...

Act 1: The Insurmountable Challenge In 1817, New York voted to dig a ditch . And not just any ditch. A grand canal! Dug by hand, 363 miles long, across forests, swamps, and rock. Most experts scoffed. George Washington had dismissed similar ideas decades earlier. Thomas Jefferson called it “a little short of madness.” At the time, farmers and manufacturers in the West faced a brutal choice. To rea...

Our neighbors say they love their EVs. We take a test drive. They’re quick. They’re quiet. They’re fun! Then the facts elbow in. EVs were sold as being cheaper , but in America, they aren’t. Many lose value fast. Some models shed close to half their value in a year . Sales have flattened . They’ll likely spike before the federal credit expires September 30, then sag after. Some of us want to love...

Belief vs. Biology: Is a Sustainable Environment a Human Right? This week, the world’s highest court spoke. The United Nations’ top judges issued a sweeping opinion: nations might violate international law if they fail to act on climate change ( Associated Press, July 23, 2025, Molly Quell and Mike Corder reported ). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion posited that a sustainable envir...

State Government Funding Is a Paradox State governments do important work, but too often, they’re boxed in. If we want better roads, stronger schools, and healthier communities, we don’t need to cut federal support. We need to change how it works. Fragmented control kills leadership and accountability. Federal and state officials often share authority with different priorities. That overlap create...

We Don’t Build a Country on Things We Can Touch Not really. We build it on belief. We believe a piece of paper can be worth a dollar. We believe strangers can govern us. We believe that if we follow the rules, justice and liberty will protect us. None of that is real, not like gravity or fire. But it works because enough of us believe. That’s what holds a nation together. Not armies. Not buildings...

The One Big Beautiful Bill: A Poem Our lives pass like shadows, despair takes root within us. We convince ourselves property is our natural right; that we can own the land here before us, remaining when we are gone. We guard it jealously, believing what we earn must remain ours alone. We charge our leaders with duty: to defend our lives, our liberty, our property. Yet to do so, we bury the unborn...

When the Cure Doesn’t Serve the People, the System Fails the Constitutional Test Public money, on its face, should yield public benefit. But every year, the federal government sends almost  sixty billion dollars to universities like Harvard for research and development , most of it through the Department of Health and Human Services. A university takes federal funding, makes a breakthrough, and li...

Misunderstanding Iran’s Ideological Nature Invites Endless Conflict American B-2 bombers struck Iran’s uranium-enrichment sites at Fordow, Natanz, and Isfahan. President Trump called the raid successful. Tehran vowed retaliation. Washington insists the raids sought to halt Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon. No one in America supports a nuclear-armed Iran. Iran’s nuclear march is a real threat,...

The Spark This week, outrage erupted after law enforcement used force against protesters opposing ICE raids in Los Angeles and other cities. We shouldn’t be surprised by any of it. For anyone paying attention, there’s already a blueprint. The administration intends to restore their version of order. Then came the political theater. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez condemned the violence. Go...

We Say We Believe in Justice. But We’ve Stopped Asking What That Actually Means. Some say it means equality. Others, freedom. Some try to manage it with policy. Others trust the market to sort it out. We argue. We legislate. We campaign. But half of working American families still need government help just to survive. That’s not justice. That’s a national failure. We’ve normalized, excused, and ev...