By The Federalist (Politics) | Created at 2025-04-01 11:41:24 | Updated at 2025-04-02 17:04:23
1 day ago
The following is the prepared text of a speech the author gave in March at an Indiana Call to Action event in South Bend, Indiana.
The New York Times recently released data putting Indiana in the top 10 states Americans relocated to in 2023. Here’s that list, in order according to relocation numbers: Texas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, Indiana, Colorado, Tennessee, and Oklahoma.
Seven of these are completely Republican-controlled, and two have Republican legislatures. Indiana is the only state on the list without a warm or mountainous climate. Professor Michael New pointed out that eight of these ten states enacted strong pro-life laws after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. It didn’t damage their attractions one bit.
Interesting that eight of these 10 states have passed strong pro-life laws since Dobbs This really undercuts the mainstream media narrative the people are fleeing pro-life states. pic.twitter.com/WqceVtUACa
Republican leaders are constantly economically blackmailed into inaction in the culture war, but it turns out the blackmailers are bluffing. Big companies — which are also blackmailed by tiny factions of woke crazies — claim they won’t relocate to states that don’t make Democrat policies, but that’s just not true. And Republicans need to stop pretending they believe it.
The Trump era shows us winning the culture war wins elections and energizes voters. Donald Trump was certainly elected on anti-elite economic policies on immigration, trade, and taxes, but he was also elected for fighting — and winning — on family issues. One of his most effective ads showed Kamala Harris supporting taxpayer funding for transgender surgeries for prisoners.
That is not the kind of Republican Americans have mostly found on our ballots since Reagan. Republicans have retreated to tinkering with tax policy and championing “low regulation” as their safe haven from engaging the culture war. Now, I love low taxes and regulation as much as the next Milton Friedman fan, but I also know a great culture and nation is not built or sustained simply on low marginal tax rates. Republicans need to start thinking a lot bigger and a lot deeper.
Shift the Cultural Overton Window
Hoosiers voted for Trump by a 17-point margin. He was the largest vote-getter in the state. Hoosier voters want Trump’s policies and courageous leadership style. We are also in the mood for dramatic changes. Now is the time to shift our cultural Overtown Window.
Low taxes don’t matter if our kids are picking up pornography at the local library or, God forbid, being encouraged to mutilate their bodies and witness nudity and smell weed in the public square. Low regulations aren’t amazing if they attract predatory business models that only pay enough to sustain imported laborers who live three families to a house, stick others with their medical bills, and require taxpayer-paid translators in schools, where their children rarely proceed past a fifth-grade level and therefore will be generational welfare dependents.
These are insights that President Trump forced political elites to recognize. His massive electoral success in 2024 has consolidated the Republican Party into supporting middle Americans against the so-called elites who sell us and our kids out to cheap foreign labor. And Republicans who don’t play for the Trump team at local levels kiss their political advancement goodbye, because J.D. Vance is now in charge of funding and recruitment for seats in Congress.
Reversing the Cultural Revolution
Trump’s victory is the first time in a century that movement conservatives will run the entire federal government from the inside. The great Phyllis Schlafly boldly endorsed Trump in 2016 just before she died. For her entire life, just like the Tea Partiers, Schlafly had to fight both the Democrats and the Republicans with her grassroots army.
Now, the man Phyllis picked as her successor, Ed Martin, is Trump’s D.C. U.S. attorney. Trump has taken us, the Republican base, from being targets of our government to running it. This creates a pivotal, once-in-a-lifetime moment in U.S. history — and it can easily be squandered.
We who by God’s providence are alive at this time must make the most of this incredible gift. It would be abandoning our duties to go about business as usual during the slim window we have to finally address our nation’s many existential crises. Many of those were revealed to Americans with the totalitarian trauma our governments inflicted upon us in 2020 and beyond, shifting the school-lockdown generation right.
We have the opportunity to reverse what commentators like Chris Rufo and Chinese Cultural Revolution survivor Xi Van Fleet call America’s cultural revolution. If you truly love America, you will do everything you can to ensure Trump’s presidency reverses America’s managed decline. That starts with thinking a lot bigger than tax incentives for big businesses that are going to come here anyway because they can’t survive in Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
The Purpose of the Economy Is the Family
An economy exists to serve human flourishing. Families are more important than the economy. Republicans need to stop majoring in the minors and get into the big leagues.
America’s Founders believed the purpose of government was to secure citizens’ rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Here in the Declaration of Independence they don’t mention money. It’s not because they didn’t know people need work. It’s because they knew property is only as good as the liberty and character you have to use it well.
Ask any rich guy: Would he rather have his money or his life? We all know which he should chose. That’s because we all know there are higher things than material goods, and that material goods should serve those higher things. This is why I am not categorically opposed to local government spending on beauty, such as in parks, bike trails, classic architecture, and other humane habitats for humans.
It is also why our state needs to reorder its priorities along the lines of what Trump has shown wins over American hearts and minds. What might this look like? Well, for one, localities should absolutely be thinking about nabbing the manufacturing that will be reshored by Trump’s tariffs. Those are good, pro-family jobs. We could also vault to the forefront in clean nuclear energy.
What about stronger immigration enforcement powers for our state police and attorney general? This session’s House Bill 1531 is a start on that, and it needs to pass. The rule of law is key to a free society, and imported low-skill workers lower the standard of living. Companies like Amazon should be ashamed to offer starvation wages, to import illegals enslaved to cartels, and to smear Americans for recognizing some working conditions and pay are below human dignity.
And how about our legislature codifies every one of Trump’s executive orders that can be applied at the state level? Unless legislatures turn Trump’s executive orders into laws, they can and will be erased by the next Democrat president. She can undo all of Trump’s policies and restart lawfare against red states and their voters. Hoosiers deserve for our legislature to protect us against this threat now.
How about erasing DEI from our National Guard and banning taxpayer funds from any institution that supports DEI in any form? What about an Indiana DOGE that searches through all Indiana’s programs and erases any that conflict with the Constitution’s requirement that citizens not be privileged by race, sex, and sexual behavior?
Making Americans Healthy Again
We also need creative legislation about the big issues propelling Trump’s win. On the Make America Healthy Again front, let’s disentangle hospital monopolies and end regulations driving independent doctors out of work. What if we required everyone who receives Medicaid, food stamps, or WIC to work with a nutritionist or take classes on how to cook healthy meals? What if we required health and food welfare recipients to log walks five days a week in an app?
Work out a deal with local fitness centers — they stop DEI commitments and give taxpayers a group discount, and taxpayers subsidize memberships. You know how much money taxpayers would save if Hoosiers got more active? Maybe start with a pilot program in a few cities. Offer it equally to all Hoosiers rather than adding benefits to taking tax money from working people. That’s where the legislature’s ridiculous $100 million increase for public health should go, not to a hostile and counterproductive bureaucracy.
Give Florida Some Policy Competition
Let’s Make Indiana Great Again on every front. What if Indiana started to consciously compete, not with short-bus states run by deranged incompetents such as Michigan and Illinois, but with our real peers, like Texas and Florida? It should be easy for Indiana to become the Florida of the Midwest. All we’d have to do is copy their pace-setting education and business policies. That’s the easy option. Even better would be trying to outdo Florida in entrepreneurial policymaking. After all, we don’t have Florida’s beaches and weather. We have to work harder to compensate.
What if Indiana started competing, not for single and yuppie strivers who live for Instagram-worthy conspicuous consumption in disgusting megalopolises like Chicago, San Francisco, and New York, but people who want to save and build, put down roots, and grow families in a sustainable, traditional American cultural environment? What if we Midwesterners celebrated and leaned into who we are? What about if we celebrated our differences from homeless-addled, dirty, and expensive cities and offered voters what makes us unique, like clean, thriving Main Streets and small-town living that is safe for families?
Hoosiers need to stop being ashamed of who and what we are that is good. There’s nothing wrong with Indiana having more people of European descent than New York City does. No American is bad because of his skin color, and that includes white people. It’s good that Gov. Mike Braun ditched former governor Eric Holcomb’s DEI cabinet position. The legislature needs to completely root out these anti-American, hateful policies that divide Americans by skin color and discourage hard work and merit. It’s time for a full return to responsibility for our lives.
We need to get rid of all the self-hating progressive catechisms that teach everyone from our kids to our leaders that they’re bad because of where their family comes from. We don’t tolerate this for black and Hispanic Americans, and we shouldn’t tolerate it for anyone else. We need to show respect to all Hoosiers by applying all policies equally, with no exceptions or pandering.
Americans just love Donald Trump’s confidence and courage. Republicans everywhere need to figure out how to copy it. Companies should be told they are expected to accommodate our religious and conservative culture, and legally bound to do so. We want Hoosiers who love their families, homes, and religion, not rootless “global citizens.” Those can go live in Chicago.
Promote Christianity
The American founders believed human happiness requires worshiping the Christian God. President John Adams warned in a 1798 letter, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Even the famous deist Thomas Jefferson attended church because he believed the president should set an example for citizens this way. We cannot have liberty without Christianity. So if you’re one of the people not going to church regularly, fix that. Go every Sunday to a church that teaches the Bible.
Today, 54 percent of Indiana teens aren’t raised by their married parents, only 58 percent of marriage-age Hoosier adults are married, and our fertility is below replacement level at 1.8 babies per woman. That’s unsustainable. Religious Americans are the only ones having sustainable numbers of kids. If you want a thriving state instead of population aging that bankrupts welfare states, don’t import foreign indentured servants, encourage Christianity.
We don’t have to violate the First Amendment to encourage Christianity. We already have done some important things that help — like school choice. A 2020 research review shows government-provided education is the number one driver of apostasy in Western nations. Why? Because government-provided schooling is anti-Christian. So the more we encourage Christian schools, the more we contribute to Indiana’s long-term sustainability.
Indiana has been a school choice pioneer, but because we passed a program early, it needs updating. Our programs include too many regulations that push religious schools to be more like public schools, rather than providing true choices between completely different options. We also haven’t solved the problem of training even private-school teachers in Marxist-run colleges.
I would solve these problems by converting the state’s voucher program into education savings accounts fueled by full backpack funding, and revamping Indiana’s teacher credentialing system. Erase teaching majors and recruit teachers from content-focused majors like history, science, math, and literature.
Convert the state department of education into a teacher training institute rather than an enforcer of expensive and harmful federal regulations, and turn it over to people who have proven teaching excellence through running classical schools. Require early elementary teachers to know the science of reading through skill-specific tests, not low-quality teaching degrees or a general teacher licensure test with pass rates at the level of a fifth grader.
One in every five American adults is functionally illiterate. More than half only read at a sixth-grade level or worse. This discredits public schools. People who preside over failure at this scale aren’t credible to run or reform education. We need new ideas and new people in education. Trump abolishing the Department of Education opens the door wide to true innovation.
Restore Good and True Core Curricula
Hoosier kids deserve the best curriculum in the country. There is no good reason Indiana can’t adopt Hillsdale College’s or the National Association of Scholars’ K-12 history curriculum to immediately vault us to best state in the nation on that. Let’s quintuple the state resources we’re spending on career and technical education, to fulfill Governor Braun’s goal of saving Hoosiers from spending years and millions of taxpayer dollars on degrees that don’t contribute to their economic viability and that make them more anti-family and anti-American.
For the fewer who do go to college, the General Education Act from the Ethics and Public Policy Center and National Association of Scholars would establish a classical core curriculum at a state university to become a fulcrum for reforming higher education. This would also produce better graduates to staff schools. Utah is about to pass this, Florida is making huge strides in reforming its colleges in this direction, and Indiana shouldn’t let them lap us.
Higher education is also the place to start a dramatic reform of the legal profession. Indiana can lead the nation on this too. The majority of American lawyers work to destroy the Constitution, as we can see with the unprecedented number of unappealable and anti-Constitution orders judges are placing on Trump. We need states to create alternatives to the woke American Bar Association and for our state universities to be accredited by such an alternative.
The ABA has destroyed its credibility by supporting Joe Biden creating a constitutional amendment with an executive order and pushing universities (including Indiana University) to replace their constitutional law courses with anti-American courses promoting discrimination by race, sex, and sexual perversity. Taxpayer-funded law schools should turn out people who defend the Constitution, not destroy it. The legislature has a solemn responsibility to make that happen.
People who want genderqueer pagan schooling can move to California and New York. People who want traditional, Christian-friendly, pro-America education can move to Indiana. This should be our explicit brand, and we should be proud of it.
Stop Subsidizing Family Disintegration
Related: Our legislature has got to stop subsidizing the separation of small children from their mothers. They call such programs “preschool” and “workforce development,” but these feminist programs damage the future workforce by damaging the children who will fill it. Babies, toddlers, and preschoolers need to be with their mothers the majority of their days. It is a biological fact as true as the fact that men and women are different.
For happiness, babies need their mothers’ touch, voice, and smell. Separating babies from their mothers much of the day raises their stress hormones. Chronically elevating a baby’s stress hormones leads to health problems that can persist through adulthood. Our society needs strong adults, and we get that by encouraging mothers to do what women do best: mother our children.
Present mothers also promote health by cooking food from scratch. They contribute to our society in thousands of ways that matter a billion times more than money. The grotesqueness of pretending men and women are interchangeable is obvious when you look at transvestites, but we all participate in it and need to stop. Girls need female-oriented expectations and pathways to a fulfilling life, pathways that honor and celebrate that we’re made for motherhood.
Paid-leave is not a pro-family policy, because it assumes a child is a six-week interruption to long-term family separation. Marriage, part-time opportunities, jobs that don’t relocate families far from their relatives, and household wages for married men are pro-woman policies because these free women to not have to work two demanding full-time jobs while our children are small.
Make the Streets Safe, Clean, and Hospitable
Here are more pro-mother policies: increase the number of police, and get homeless addicts and other frightful do-nothings off our streets. A recent survey showed Americans’ no. 1 desire for where they live is safety, and that’s even more important to those who want or have children. Mothering is more fun and relaxing when your children can play outside. We need a “wear your headphones” act that incentivizes ticketing people for playing loud music in public, making public spaces inhospitable to families and the enjoyment of nature.
We also need secondhand smoke ordinances — for weed. It is not child-friendly or healthy for streets to smell like weed. No way should our legislature legalize marijuana. As reporters Alex Berenson and Michael Shellenberger have shown, legalizing weed increases homelessness and drags public resources. Since 2020, crime and neighborhood nuisances have dramatically increased. It’s time to target them with more police and safety laws.
Mothers need clean, safe, inviting, and hospitable public places to brighten the hard work of caring for small children. This is another reason it’s terrible that public libraries have turned into porn stores and homeless flophouses. Our legislature can insist that libraries stop using tax dollars to purchase porn, and stop allowing sex shows on public property. It’s not “book banning” to enforce indecency laws, any more than it’s “against free speech” to punish people who shout lies about “fire” in a crowded theater. Homeless people should be required to take responsibility for themselves, including by requiring them to get clean and not fill public areas.
When the streets and parks are safe for children to play unsupervised, then more women will love mothering and the children won’t be so fat. On this note, school boards and the legislature need to discourage children using tablets and cell phones, especially at school.
Restoring a Culture of Family-Based Responsibility
As you can tell, I have lots of ideas. You will have others. Part of my goal is to encourage bold, dramatic, swift action focused on Hoosier greatness. That starts with refocusing our political ecosystem on families and restoring expectations that citizens take responsibility for themselves.
Do you all remember watching Trump dodge that bullet? That was a miracle. When you see a sign from God, do you go back to business as usual? Or do you get on your knees and ask God what He’d have you do, and then go do it as fast and as well as you can?
None of us alive have ever seen a moment like the one we are in, and the odds are we’ll never have one again. We’ve been gifted one more morning in America. It’s time to be fully awake and hard at work, not to roll over and go back to sleep.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is "False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America." A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include "Classic Books For Young Children," and "101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation." An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," from Encounter Books.
