PODCAST

I Believe

Joel K. Douglas

Philosophy from the American Experiment joelkdouglas.substack.com

society & culture philosophy

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27:39

TWENTY-TWO

I Believe ·

2026/01/06

Act I. Tick Tock[SFX: The noise of New York City][Narrator] New York City in December. Manhattan. No snow yet, but the cold sits like it’s waiting for something.A kid walks home from work. Twenty-four years old. Jacket zipped to the throat. Same route he always takes. Down from Midtown, cutting through the side streets. Too many tourists on the main streets.He wants to move through the world without it touching him.It’s 6:12 PM. The sun is already gone. The crosswalk timer across the street blinks

24:08

Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot?

I Believe ·

2025/12/30

[SFX: Solo Guitar playing Auld Lang Syne]Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind? Should old acquaintance be forgot, and the days of long ago?We’ve forgotten the meaning of the song playing in the background when we toast on New Year’s Eve.Let’s remember.Back to Ulysses S. Grant. He couldn’t hear music. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t. And the most important moment of his life would be defined by a song.Act I. The Man Who Couldn’t Hear MusicWashington, D.C., March 8, 1864.Ulysses S

43:53

A Christmas Carol for King George

I Believe ·

2025/12/23

This story is true. Except for the parts with the ghosts. [SFX: Theater applause]Dim the lights.Prologue. London. December, 1776.One lone leaf on the London plane outside the King’s window trembles in the light breeze, like the whole city just let out a quiet breath.It had clung to its branch through the long autumn, through winds that had stripped its companions and sent them spinning across the grounds of Windsor Castle. But now, in the stillness of a December evening, with no wind at all to speak

27:38

Who Can the President Fire?

I Believe ·

2025/12/16

2025. The president fires an FTC commissioner before her term is up. The statute says he can’t without cause. He does it anyway. Now the Supreme Court has to decide whether ninety years of precedent was real law, or a bluff. Act I. The Wager[SFX: casino room, cards dealt, chips stacked, ice clinking in glasses]Players stare at each other across a poker table. Four cards are up. One card is face down. The last card decides everything, but nobody gets to see it until somebody commits.You can stare at

26:04

Who Gave You Permission to Touch Our Sky?

I Believe ·

2025/12/09

Act I. The Sky WarSFX: Thunder rolling in the distance. A slow rotor hum. Laos. March 20th, 1967.A C-130 Hercules lifts off from Udon Royal Thai Air Force Base just after sunset. The crew has the cargo bay loaded with canisters. Not bombs, not supplies; canisters of silver iodide mixed with lead iodide and acetone. Command briefed the crew separately from every other unit on base. The flight plan logs say the crew's mission is “weather reconnaissance.”Their actual mission: to make it rain over the

30:43

Should Every Generation be Richer than their Parents?

I Believe ·

2025/12/02

Act I. The Golden Handcuffs(SFX: Blizzard wind.)January 1914. Highland Park, Michigan. Six degrees above zero.Ten thousand men press against the iron gates of the Ford Motor Company. Wool coats thin as paper. Broken boots stamping frozen mud. The guards inside are terrified. The mob is too large, so they turn the fire hoses on them. The water hits. Soaks through. Freezes instantly to ice on their coats.The men don’t leave. They stand there, shivering, because a rumor has spread through the tenements

29:02

The House You'll Never Own

I Believe ·

2025/11/18

Act One. The Penny AuctionsNebraska, October 6, 1932. Five and a half miles southwest of Elgin, in the middle of farm country. Theresa Von Baum, a widow who worked her 80-acre farm with only the help of her sons after her husband’s death, couldn’t make the payment on her $442 mortgage. The bank moved to foreclose. The bank expected to make hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars for the farm.Nearly 3,000 farmers from Antelope and neighboring counties showed up at the Von Baum farm that day. They

26:41

Can a Nation Survive on Charity?

I Believe ·

2025/11/11

Act 1. Andrew CarnegieIt’s 1892. Homestead, Pennsylvania.Andrew Carnegie pays his steelworkers an average of $1.68 a day. About $56 in today’s money. Twelve-hour shifts. Six days a week.The workers and their families shared rooms that smelled like smoke and steel dust. The beds were never cold because workers on different shifts all used them. They ate bread, onions, sometimes meat. The lucky ones had shoes that fit. Nutrition, sanitation, and health were poor. Workplace injuries were

26:42

Are Food Stamps Theft?

I Believe ·

2025/11/04

Act 1. The First Food StampScene One: May, 1939. The Machinist and the SurplusOn the morning of May 16, 1939, Ralston Thayer stood first in line at Rochester, New York’s old post office. He was thirty-five years old. A machinist. A veteran of the Great War. He had been out of work for nearly a year. Newspaper reporters crowded around him. Photographers jockeyed for position. Thayer was making history, and they wanted a piece of the action. He walked up to the cashier window and handed over four

29:12

Should American Cattle Ranchers Sacrifice for China?

I Believe ·

2025/10/28

A president offers to buy beef from a country we just bailed out. Argentina. American ranchers call it betrayal. Economists say it won’t lower prices. Everyone calls it stupid.But that same country just sold seven million tons of soybeans to China instead of us. And three-quarters of their beef exports go to China. And we just gave them twenty billion dollars. And their president is our president’s ideological ally.Maybe it’s not about beef. Maybe it’s about China.But the ranchers still get hurt

45:14

The Packs Don’t Get Lighter

I Believe ·

2025/10/21

A successful elk season has come and gone. Elk season isn’t just about the harvest, or packing heavy loads out of the mountains, though those activities are often involved.Elk season is communion. With the mountain, and with each other. It’s a time of remembrance. Checking on kids and wives. Eating and drinking together. You might hunt with someone you see often, or someone you haven’t seen in ten years.Nearly every hunter in the camps I frequent is a veteran. We tell old war stories, curse aging,

18:51

Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God

I Believe ·

2025/10/14

The Chicken TaxScene. It’s 1962. American farmers have cracked the code.We can raise chickens cheap. Like, really cheap. Industrial-scale factory farms, efficient as hell. We start shipping frozen chickens to Europe by the boatload. German housewives love it. French families love it. Half the price of local chicken. Maybe even tastier!European chicken farmers do not love it. They’re getting destroyed. So, France and West Germany do what countries do when their people scream loud enough. They slap

20:15

Do We Trust Every Future President?

I Believe ·

2025/10/07

The Six-Hour Bomb: When Alexander Hamilton Almost Killed the ConstitutionJune 18, 1787. Philadelphia. The temperature in the Pennsylvania State House had already hit 85 degrees. Fifty-five men in wool coats and powdered wigs sat trapped in a room with the windows nailed shut and doors guarded for secrecy. The delegates chose privacy over performance so they could speak freely. They had been arguing openly for three weeks about how to build a government. Nothing was working.Alexander Hamilton finally

17:38

Why Do We Still Need Temporary Workers After 35 Years?

I Believe ·

2025/09/30

October 17, 1933. New York HarborAlbert Einstein stepped off a passenger ship at the Port of New York, carrying two suitcases and a violin case. He and his wife, Elsa, had fled Nazi Germany. His books were being burned. There was a bounty on his head: one million dollars. He had to flee. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, offered him refuge. American universities, including Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, kept Jewish faculty to a minimum under quotas that lingered into the late

23:59

Does the Civil Rights Act Violate the Constitution?

I Believe ·

2025/09/23

On September 10th, a gunman killed Charlie Kirk in Utah. The event reminds us that no one should die over speech, and that we must wrestle with big questions calmly. You don’t have to love him or hate him. At times, his message resonated with many across America. At times, it divided us. If we say we disagree with his points, we should be able to make the case. If we can’t, his spears carry weight.One of his sharpest questions was this: Does the Civil Rights Act of 1964 violate the

46:18

Should We Fund Education At All? With Shaka Mitchell

I Believe ·

2025/09/16

Joel Douglas (00:03) My guest today is Shaka Mitchell, a senior fellow for the American Federation for Children, a Nashville-based attorney, a Belmont adjunct teaching constitutional law, and a leader dedicated to transforming education for underserved families. He’s a featured guest on TEDx Nashville and podcasts like The Learning Curve and Charterfolk. The charter schools Shaka has worked with drive real growth for Nashville’s underserved kids, often doubling district test scores in math and

17:23

Should Public Money for Schools Guarantee More Than...

I Believe ·

2025/09/09

Should Public Money for Schools Guarantee More Than Learning?This week, the National School Lunch Program, born out of national defense, and the rise of homeschooling vouchers, where freedom meets responsibility.And next week, we’ll dig even deeper with our guest, Shaka Mitchell! But for now … the lights are dimming. Look! There's the curtain!Scene One. Frontier America, 1809 Education, even without public funds, can serve national goals like Union and Liberty.A father and mother have their second

24:22

Why Can’t I Afford a Home?

I Believe ·

2025/08/26

Act 1: The Insurmountable ChallengeIn 1817, New York voted to dig a ditch. And not just any ditch. A grand canal! Dug by hand, 363 miles long, across forests, swamps, and rock. Most experts scoffed. George Washington had dismissed similar ideas decades earlier. Thomas Jefferson called it “a little short of madness.”At the time, farmers and manufacturers in the West faced a brutal choice. To reach markets, they had to send their goods down the Mississippi River to New Orleans, the country’s greatest

18:38

Are We Designing Our Tools to Fail on Purpose?

I Believe ·

2025/08/19

Our neighbors say they love their EVs. We take a test drive. They’re quick. They’re quiet. They’re fun!Then the facts elbow in. EVs were sold as being cheaper, but in America, they aren’t. Many lose value fast. Some models shed close to half their value in a year. Sales have flattened. They’ll likely spike before the federal credit expires September 30, then sag after.Some of us want to love EVs, but something isn’t quite right.Is it the range, shorter in winter, the waits at chargers, or that

16:41

Is a Sustainable Environment a Human Right?

I Believe ·

2025/07/29

Belief vs. Biology: Is a Sustainable Environment a Human Right?This week, the world’s highest court spoke. The United Nations’ top judges issued a sweeping opinion: nations might violate international law if they fail to act on climate change (Associated Press, July 23, 2025, Molly Quell and Mike Corder reported). The International Court of Justice (ICJ) opinion posited that a sustainable environment is a human right. And that nations harmed by climate change might be entitled to reparations. The

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