We have tons of problems, and the right/wrong track direction is overwhelmingly negative, and yet not all issues are equally troubling. Our national debt is almost at $34T. Our military is not ready for the new axis of evil of Russia, China, Iran & North Korea. We are aborting a large part of our future every year. Our education system poorly serves the most vulnerable. We have no idea who is coming into our country via the southern border. You can probability make this much more complete. But what is the biggest issue? For most Christians, the moral decay of the country is clearly the biggest issue, as pretty much most of our other differences and issues flow out of a culture that rejects a biblical worldview. So the church has a whole lot of work to reach people for the gospel, and we would get the not inconsequential side benefit of a culture that wouldn’t kill babies, run up trillions of dollars of debt, enable dependency and promote drug use. But what would be the most important political issue that we face, i.e., something that we should expect the next president to address?

I want to suggest that our #1 problem is that our young people are being taught to hate their country and our institutions. While this is primarily on the left with their focus on critical theory, or alternatively cultural marxism, it is often now on the right in their views of the FBI or the Department of Justice.* We’ve known it for quite some time, but since it didn’t manifest itself publicly in a big way, it was something that was not seen as critically important. Sure the young people aren’t as patriotic as previous generations:

In addition to party identification, age appears to significantly affect Americans’ national pride. Whereas 50% of U.S. adults aged 55 and older say they are extremely proud to be American, 40% of those aged 35 to 54 and 18% of 18- to 34-year-olds say the same.

But eventually they’ll grow up. After all, do they really want any of the alternatives?

And then Hamas attacked Israel and suddenly we saw the depth of the rot in young people. And any sane person would ask, where did this anti-Semitism come from? The obvious answer was that they have been taught this; it was not surprising that the emergence of the protests initially came from student groups at progressive college campuses. And as this articulate young lady suggests, we shouldn’t have been surprised, as it was there all along, and it is a product of our education system:

This has major implications that we should be considering, but few are paying attention. Our military struggles to meet recruiting goals, and our loss of patriotism is a primary reason for this.**

I’m not sure what the solution is, but the beginning must be a full-fledged movement to school choice, and the elimination of the Education Department, but this is going to take a generation to unravel. It will also need to consider how we handle TikTok, as Congressman Mike Gallagher notes:

According to a Harvard/Harris poll, 51 percent of Americans ages 18–24 believe Hamas was justified in its brutal terrorist attacks on innocent Israeli citizens on October 7.  I read that statistic at a time where I thought I’d lost the capacity to be shocked. For weeks, I’ve seen the clips and read the firsthand stories documenting Hamas’s atrocities: burned bodies, decapitated babies, raped women, children tied together with their parents, mutilated corpses. I’d seen the rallies on elite campuses celebrating Hamas’s murderous cause, the faculty letters excusing the terrorists. I thought I had grasped the extent of the moral rot. I thought I had seen the bottom. But I hadn’t. How did we reach a point where a majority of young Americans hold such a morally bankrupt view of the world? Where many young Americans were rooting for terrorists who had kidnapped American citizens—and against a key American ally? Where were they getting the raw news to inform this upside-down world view? The short answer is, increasingly, via social media and predominantly TikTok. 

Now it’s your turn. What is the biggest issue we face in the country? Can you top this one? And if you agree, what would you suggest the next Administration focus on to turn the ship around?

* There is clearly an administrative state which now runs much of our country with little accountability, and there are clearly some bad actors that have a political agenda at the top of many of our executive agencies. But it does not necessarily follow that there is a deep state where all the government is aligned against a conservative agenda.

** It also doesn’t help that the military has embraced the whole critical theory thing with DEI programs. Even patriotic young people don’t want to join an institution that tells them how rotten their country is. Notice the one service that is meeting recruitment goals. The Marines. Because they stand for something.