September 20, 2022
Pocatello–The dining room at Mountain Valley Baptist Church buzzed with greetings and chat last Saturday evening, as local conservatives gathered to share a meal and support American freedom. After dinner, legislative candidates Jake Stevens and David Worley addressed the crowd.
Jake Stevens, District 29’s candidate for Idaho’s House of Representatives, shared his passion to ensure that today’s children will have the same freedoms and opportunities that his own generation enjoyed. “I’m an avid outdoorsman,” he said, “and I’ve always lived by the rule, ‘Leave it better than you found it’. We are not on track to leave a better Idaho than we found it–we are not on track to leave a better America than we found it.” Stevens believes that education reform is key. He called for enacting legislation to provide for school choice, thus forcing public and private schools to compete for education dollars. This competition, he believes, will result in all schools becoming more responsive to the desires of parents than to pressure from the trans movement.
Stevens also called for tax reform, driven by both fiscal responsibility and the reduction or elimination of certain taxes. His plan includes simplifying tax assessments; eliminating the use of foregone revenue; limiting county and municipal budget increases to 3% annually, unless the affected citizens vote to permit a higher increase; and consolidating taxing districts.
David Worley, District 29’s candidate for Idaho Senate, concluded the evening with an eloquent and impassioned appeal to the assembled patriots to put their faith to action in politics. He began by discussing the philosophical transformation that has overwhelmed the Democratic party. “The Democrat party of today,” he said, “is not the party of Truman, or FDR, or John F. Kennedy. It’s not even the party of Bill Clinton, [who] championed the Defense of Marriage Act…this change has created a new type of party.” He then explained the difference between a liberal and a leftist: the liberal can disagree with conservatives on both political and societal questions, but still coexist; the leftist has his own religion and morality, and will not tolerate dissent in any form.
To combat the threat of this Marxist ideology, Worley draws inspiration from President Reagan’s response to Soviet communism: “We win–they lose.” And how do we win? “We have to reestablish the premise of American government to win this fight…The central idea of the American Revolution is actually very simple: There is a God–our rights come from Him–and the purpose of government is to protect those rights.” Leftist “woke” communism, in contrast, is an atheistic religion that requires force to achieve its ends, since it denies the existence of a moral foundation. “If we are going to actually win this fight, we have to recognize that the enemy wants to displace the very foundation of our system of government, which means we have to defend and restore it…systems of government will always be based on some system of morality. Our Founders wisely decided that they should base it on the God of Heaven,” a point which Worley proceeded to prove from history. He then explained that all history’s ‘-isms’– communism, Marxism, etc.–are “God-sized ideologies…idolatry in the modern age.” Our choice, he believes, is clear: “Will we return to our nation as founded? or will we allow that nation to be destroyed, and replaced with a rival secular religion that in every iteration has left nothing but blood, and horror, and tyranny, everywhere in the world it’s been tried?”
In closing, Worley shared his vision for the Republican Party and for Idaho. He called for a restoration of the balance between federal and state power, using Florida as an example of how states can reclaim their sovereignty and independence, thus shielding their citizens from the abuses of the federal government. Ultimately, though, Worley believes that the solution is to be found in individual Americans, in American families, and in American churches. We must reclaim our responsibilities to train and educate our own children, and we must call our communities back to the God of the Founders. “We win by returning to that God Whose providence allowed this country to be founded,” he said. “We need churches, and we need Christians, who will fight for truth and righteousness in the public sphere…We as a People need to decide that we will be the people that God wants us to be, so that like our forefathers, we can see the blessings of Divine Providence, and fully expect His aid.”
