Paul Mero

The year 2018 will be the year of the woman and conservatives should not be afraid. The culture war is over and we lost. Rather than fretting about the past, conservatives need to address today’s realities. Though we lost the culture war, we were not wrong about it. Family is the fundamental unit of society and everyone pays the price for ignoring it. But it has been ignored and we are paying the price. Conservatives will either accept this reality or ignore it to our further societal and political detriment. read more

Ecologies are all around us – and not just the environmental kind. So many human experiences are part of ecologies that if we alter Point A, Point Z is impacted. My favorite example is the ecology of freedom. Freedom is best understood as a network of human experiences that, when in equilibrium, we can say justifiably that we are living as a free people.

Individual liberty is not freedom but individual liberty is a part of freedom’s ecology. Without it we are not free but neither are we free if that is all we have. Our freedom is comprised of various elements of our lives such as the ability to transact, the ownership of property, the common good, community and, most importantly, being our better selves. read more

If you think Donald Trump is fit to be President of the United States, try writing about a relatively simple public policy that Trump is trying to explain. Clarity is nearly impossible. Even when he yells and points and pounds a podium to emphasize where he stands on an issue, there is no reason to believe him or that he even knows what he is talking about.

A Trump policy that should be absolutely ingrained in the minds of voters is building a wall on our southern border with Mexico. For two years now, all we have heard from Trump is the need for a huge wall to keep out the bad guys. And, now, that time has come. read more

Many popular comedies, past and present, are centered on people, different from the mainstream crowd, looking to fit in. A great example was the 1960s comedy The Beverley Hillbillies. Its theme song describes the whole show – hillbillies strike oil and move to Beverley Hills where they find their back-woods customs and simplistic lives are completely out of place.

These comedies endure through many seasons of tension between the perceived assets of the outsider versus liabilities. In the case of the hillbillies, they had lots of money and quite a few of their neighbors were willing to overlook what they saw as eccentricities to share in that wealth. Alas, no benefit ultimately could overcome the differences. read more

In looking back on the year 2017, Americans have witnessed political, cultural and economic cycles like few other years in recent memory. Personally, I began this year by unaffiliating with the Republican Party. Trump was too much for me to bear. He turned out to be the president many of us thought he would be. He remains ill suited to be the leader of the free world. In fact, I predicted earlier this year that Trump would not make it to the end of the year – either he would resign or be booted from office. Yet, there he remains. read more

Over the past few months, I have been working with a few colleagues to develop a new “Utah Poverty Compact” modeled after the immigration compact released in 2010. The immigration compact changed public opinion nearly overnight. My hope is that a new poverty compact would have the same effect on public opinion and policy makers.

Among my several justifications for creating a new poverty compact, two societal aspects are often overlooked.

First, a poverty compact has the ability to decrease class differences in Utah and set an example for the nation. The nation is torn apart by class warfare. One article has received a lot of attention recently for its call to violence against the rich. The author writes, read more

Where do we go from here now that Roy Moore has been given a justifiably ignominious political burial and the sexual harassment genie is out of the bottle for good? How long will the victims of harassment and abuse continue to come out of the shadows? The stream must be endless. How much harassment and abuse do you think exists in America today? My guess is a lot.

But, as usual, I am more interested in the tougher questions surrounding these atrocities and controversies. For instance, frankly, I do not know how much longer these accusations will last. While I believe that harassment and abuse are rampant today, I am not so sure about the desire of every victim to go public. We see so many Hollywood stars each of whom has their story of harassment and abuse. Naturally, they get a lot of attention. They are in the attention business. read more

Do you want to know why so many Americans identify as independent or, here in Utah, unaffiliated voters? The reason is that partisanship never serves the common good. By its very nature, partisanship is insular, exclusionary and selfish. It encourages bad behavior in the name of a perverse sense of loyalty and it does not serve the public interest.

Of course, the best current example of how partisanship turns otherwise intelligent people into flaming idiots is the Roy Moore candidacy in Alabama. The Republican Senate candidate is accused of gross improprieties with underage girls. The accusations are numerous, detailed and verified – so blatant, in fact, that there is little doubt about their veracity. Politics is not a court of law. It is the court of public opinion. Roy Moore should quit his race. But he won’t. Furthermore, Republican faithful, from the White House to the local courthouse, stand by their man. read more