by Dan Eichenberger M.D. Language remains one of humanity’s most powerful tools. Spoken words helped early humans cooperate, hunt and pass down knowledge. Written language allowed civilizations to record laws, ideas and stories for future generations. Today, language is under attack. The political Left, particularly progressive activists who dominate many colleges, news outlets and major corporations, has increasingly weaponized words. Terms are stretched, flipped and redefined to make questionable ideas sound normal and to make dissent…

by Mark Franke With the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, there is a plethora of new books written about this major event. Most focus on the Declaration’s language and its meaning, especially its most memorable sentence in the second paragraph. That’s understandable but I am a contrarian by nature so I have been wondering about the process of writing, editing and publishing the Declaration. For example, is the document on display at the National…

Common Sense Catches Up THIRTY YEARS AGO, George Witwer, a founding scholar of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation and now CEO of Cavo Health, won a dark-horse race for the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor at a contested state convention. He did so campaigning on the floor, delegate-by-delegate, with a simple argument, “Property taxes mean you never really own your property, you merely rent it.” We highlighted it in our book, “Indiana Mandate: An Agenda for the 1990s.”…

by John F. Gaski, Ph.D. The way Donald Trump has faltered on Iran is far beyond what we could have foreseen. The latest Iran pseudo-negotiations represent another surrender by President Trump. We never thought he would cave to Iran as Biden and Obama did, but it now appears that he doesn’t have the stomach to “finish the job.” Maybe he still imagines that a Nobel Peace Prize is achievable.   Trump actually has surrendered several times to…

by Dan Eichenberger MD, MBA To prevent the further erosion of ordered society, Indiana must take a clear and permanent stand against the Left’s campaign to detach law from biological reality. Activists have spent years pressuring institutions to replace objective sex with subjective “gender identity.” The General Assembly and voters should amend the state Constitution to codify objective, scientifically grounded definitions of “man” and “woman.” Statutory efforts are welcome but remain vulnerable to reinterpretation or reversal…

by Mark Franke With the semiquincentennial of the Declaration of Independence, there are a lot of new books written about this major event. Most focus on the Declaration’s language and its meaning, especially its most memorable sentence in the second paragraph. One historian, Stanford’s Michael Auslin, has taken a refreshingly different approach by telling the story of the physical document throughout our history. And it is an intriguing story, one replete with disappearances, changes in…

A Murder Most ‘Random’ IT WAS MY FAULT. Even after a gracious interview with a Capital Chronicle columnist, Stacey Compton, I didn’t get my point across, the ideological gap being just too wide. I wanted to object to the reflexive description in recent murder stories of black-on-white violence as “random.” It is anything but that.  In its statistical context, the word means “being governed by or involving equal chances for each item.” That would not describe the National FBI Supplementary Homicide report that…

The Fraud of Official Art “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my Lugar.” —  Hermann Göring THE MAYOR this week unveiled “The Garner,” our city’s latest acquisition of outdoor art. It is shown above so you can judge for yourself but let me say I find it hopelessly abstruse. It took even the artist himself, Sacho Primo, the winner of a global competition for goodness sake, considerable effort to describe it: “The installation is composed of six…

by Dan Eichenberger, M.D. With Father’s Day approaching, the cultural conversation about men, fathers, and masculinity deserves more care than slogans usually allow. This is a season when many families pause to honor fathers, grandfathers, mentors and father figures whose steady presence has shaped lives in quiet but lasting ways. For that reason, the way society speaks about masculinity matters. The term “toxic masculinity” was never intended as a broad indictment of men. It was coined…

Alternative Families by the Numbers THE GOVERNOR is getting grief over declaring June “Nuclear Family Month.” Does he think there’s something wrong with non-nuclear families? Well, there’s a two-part answer to that, and some aren’t going to like the second part. First, let’s acknowledging that raising a family, any family, is a heroic endeavor. Raising a family as a single parent is especially so when it comes with the emotional throes of a divorce. One kind of family does not diminish another.…