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Citizen Leadership

Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership
Lincoln_debating_douglas

We Need to Bring Back Real Debates in America

Bruce Chapman
June 26, 2019
Citizen Leadership
The televised Democratic presidential sound byte pageants will not be true debates by any realistic standard. They are reminiscent of the 2016 Republican primaries that started with 16 candidates preening on a platform and enduring “gotcha” questions by reporters/moderators trying to get themselves into the news story. Until the nominee field narrows, these shows are almost a parody of real debates in the Lincoln-Douglas or Oxford Union manner. That’s too bad. We need to bring back real debates in America, and not just among candidates. Name the issue (climate change, foreign interference in our elections, abortion, immigration, tariffs, privacy online, the future of artificial intelligence, the meaning of “free speech,” whatever): Americans are badly divided. Since media and politicians often operate in inward-looking communities, they tend to ignore or distort views that differ from their own. In this environment, mere calls for greater civility don’t work. What can work is facing issues straight on and together. Read More ›

Springtime for Israel

John Wohlstetter
May 29, 2019
Citizen Leadership, Discovery Institute, Foreign Policy

Please join us on Thursday, June 20 for a captivating discussion on the current state of Middle East geopolitics, as Israel prepares for a new election, and how it will affect the United States with Discovery Senior Fellow and foreign policy expert John Wohlstetter. President Trump’s first year saw the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War–and also of the Read More ›

Mount Rushmore
Mount Rushmore National Monument near Keystone, South Dakota on July 26, 2013.

Presidents Day: Washington and Lincoln as Relevant Today as Ever

Scott S. Powell
February 18, 2019
Citizen Leadership
Presidents Day is unique among American holidays in providing the opportunity to remember and appreciate why George Washington and Abraham Lincoln — whose birthdays fall in February — were the two greatest U.S. presidents. While Washington was the founding father of the United States, Lincoln would later save the nation from division and collapse — bringing an end to the Civil War and the scourge of slavery. In short, Lincoln saved the republic that Washington made possible. Read More ›
Martin Luther King

King Helped Nation Fulfill its Spiritual Destiny

Scott S. Powell
January 21, 2019
Citizen Leadership

Martin Luther King Day is unique among American holidays in that it honors the one American who delivered the fulfillment of a core value expressed in the country’s founding Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Declaration’s self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Read More ›

FBI Masthead

The Deep State Digs Deeper

Scott S. Powell
January 16, 2019
Citizen Leadership

As we approach Martin Luther King Day, it seems timely to reflect on King’s statement from a Birmingham jail in 1963 that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Arguably, the greatest injustice and worst crime against the democratic republic of the United States is for an elite cadre to engineer and attempt to carry out a coup that Read More ›

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Michael Medved smiling in front of the microphone during a taping of Great Minds
Photo by Nathan Jacobson

Conserving Great Ideas

Michael Medved
January 4, 2019
Citizen Leadership

To be a conservative, says Yale polymath David Gelernter, is to “give due credit to the ideas that created the civilization we live within.” A simple and beautiful summary. In a new podcast episode of Great Mind with Michael Medved, Dr. Gelernter talks with our host Mr. Medved about the shocking irresponsibility in the failure to introduce young people to the Read More ›

Supreme Court Motto

The Federal Bureaucracy in Check

Bruce Chapman
January 3, 2019
Citizen Leadership, Discovery Institute

Congress, despite many chances, has not been willing to take responsibility for checking “the administrative state,” as the aggrandizing bureaucratic power of federal agencies has come to be known. Arrival of a Democratic House makes it still less likely that Capitol Hill will resist the continued expansion of federal rules and regulations. As executive, President Trump has tried to slow Read More ›