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I’m a Tina Turner fan, but she got it wrong in her hit a few years back called “We don’t need another Hero.” The song goes on to say:
We don’t need to know the way home, ooh
All we want is life beyond Thunderdome.
A full life needs hope, inspiration, an understanding of the value of charity, and a following of the precepts of what is honorable. So yes Tina. We do need heroes.
I found my first hero when I was eleven. We visited, my hero and I, as a Saturday morning ritual. I would leave my house at 8:30 am, mount my prize possession: a Red & Black Schwinn Deluxe Hornet Bicycle. Then it was a five-block ride to the local Sears store. My mother, bless her soul, had given me a nickel to buy a bag of popcorn on the first floor of the store. Then it was up the stairs to the TV department when all the new TV sets were on display.
No, we didn’t have our own TV at home. None of the kids in my neighborhood did. So when I arrived at the displays of new black and white TVs, I propped down in a corner to watch my hero, the king of the cowboys, Roy Rogers. He fought the bad guys in each episode, riding the western plains on his golden palomino horse Trigger.
Author Bob Greene, a past guest on my syndicated radio show, pointed out to me that, besides his weekly fight for law and order, old Roy was also full of sage advice. In one episode titled “Uncle Steve’s Finish,” Roy warns young boys not to idolize flashy con men. “He found out that there’s the wrong kind of hero worship, and that his father the schoolteacher was a much better man and his uncle the outlaw.” Who could disagree.
Then in another Saturday show called “M Stands for Murder,” Roy advised how greed can ruin a person: “He didn’t want some money. He wanted all of it. You know, that’s the funny thing about greed. It sort of grows on you. It starts out when you’re young by wanting somebody’s baseball bat or football that doesn’t belong to you, then later on wanting somebody’s job. First thing you know, you’re wanting everything in sight.”
There is sound cowboy advice in just about every episode. In “Quick Draw,” a man bemoans that he might be a coward because he was reluctant to fire his gun. Roy comforts him by saying: “You’re not a coward. You just won a great victory over yourself. Maybe now you’ll know what guns are really for. To protect, not to kill.”
And in “The Scavenger,” my cowboy idol imparts the importance of generosity when he tells a skinflint: “The church needs a new steeple and the school could use a new library. Wouldn’t you rather the people remember Moses as the grand old man whose money did so much for the town?”
Roy rode the western plains with his cowgirl wife, Dale Evans, emoting this kind of wisdom on Saturday mornings, show after show. I continued to watch my icon until his series ended in 1957. I sure miss those peaceful Saturday mornings, my black Schwinn bicycle, the nickel popcorn, and getting an education about upbeat and optimistic living from my first hero, Roy Rogers.
It’s hard to be a real hero today because such heroes are often denigrated by cynics, including the media. Politicians succeed by tearing others down. Investor Ray Dalio points out: “The cynics are people who haven’t accomplished much themselves and stand on the sidelines while criticizing the heroes who are on the field of battle. Politicians are now more polarized than collaborative, more inclined to hurt each other than to be respectful, and more likely to vote along party lines than vote based on principles about what’s right and wrong.”
Heroes are more important than ever today. Not just to help us survive, but to help us thrive and bring out our very best attributes. Yes Tina, we do need heroes. And thank you Roy Rogers for being my inspiration over these many years.

Peace and Justice
Jim Brown

A favorite argument the left propagates is that demographics are destiny, and that a tidal wave of young left-wing voters will erode GOP margins beyond repair. The argument that demographics are destiny is of course inescapable, but the argument that these demographics favor the left exclusively is misleading.
What the data shows is there have been small but discernible shifts away from the Democrat Party over the past few years. The bulk of the research on younger voters also shows a widening gender gap. Younger women are becoming increasingly liberal and younger men are not. Recent research shows that younger men hold more conservative views than older men on gender issues, including the transgender question.
While it is true that young people as a group favored Democrats at higher rates than older voters, they decreased support for Democrats compared to the 2018 midterms.
Democrats lost four points with voters under thirty between 2018 and 2022. Exit polls show Democrats won 63% of under thirties in 2022 while the GOP won 35%. However, four years ago Democrats won under thirties 67% to 32%, indicating a 4-point shift away from the Democrat Party for under thirties.
When breaking out the under thirty voting block into Gen Z (eighteen to twenty-four) and young Millennials (twenty-five to twenty-nine) the loss for Democrats is even more evident.
Democrats lost seven-points with the youngest eligible voters between 2018 and 2022. Exit polls show Democrats won 61% of Gen Z voters in 2022, down from 68% in 2018. The GOP gained five points with Zoomers, going from 31% in 2018 to 36% in 2022. The remaining Democrat losses may have gone third party.
The Market Research Foundation and Americans for Limited Government Foundation were some of the first and only research groups to point out in the 2018 midterms that very young voters in states like Florida, Georgia, Texas and Indiana voted GOP at higher rates than older peers. In several races, including in the Florida Governor’s race, Zoomers voted GOP at the highest rates of any age group under forty.
Our 2018 study of 1,500 members of Gen Z who were in middle school, high school and college at the time found unwavering support for an America First agenda, non-interventionist foreign policy, and the rule of law, particularly on the border.
Many of these young people are now eligible to vote, and while a substantial number of Zoomers supported Democrats in 2022, we are continuing to see a theme of the youngest eligible voters favoring Republican candidates at higher rates.
In the Wisconsin Senate Race last year, Ron Johnson won re-election with support from 36% of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, compared to just 24% of twenty-four- to twenty-nine-year-olds. While this is by no means a blow-out victory for Johnson, it represents a 12-point difference between very young voters and slightly older voters. This wide variance calls for further research.
In Florida last year, while DeSantis performed well with young people overall compared to past years, his strongest support came from the eighteen to twenty-four-year-old age group. Gen Z supported DeSantis by 3-points more than twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds. Compared to 2018, Zoomers supported DeSantis four points higher in 2022.
In the Michigan Governor’s race, young people voted overwhelmingly Democrat, but voters in the eighteen to twenty-four-year-old cohort supported GOP candidate Tudor Dixon by five-points more than twenty-five to twenty-nine-year-olds did. In fact, Zoomers supported GOP newcomer Tudor Dixon at the highest rate of any age group under forty.
Millennials and Gen X voters also shifted to the right in the 2022 general election. Democrats lost 5 points with voters thirty to thirty-nine, going from 59% in 2018 to 54% in 2022. Democrats also lost voters forty to forty-nine outright after winning them by narrowly in 2018.
While the mainstream media trumpets their victories with young people, they are ignoring the rightward trajectory of young voters in favor of a snapshot in time.
In addition, exit polls rarely break out younger voters by age combined with gender, and are missing the stark political differences between young men and young women.
Young men remain significantly less liberal than young women, and a growing portion are rejecting the radical left’s gender ideology, even as Boomers continue to uphold it.
Richard Manning, president of Americans for Limited Government Research Foundation, noted, “When you look behind the numbers of demographics in America, the dominant narrative fails to accurately describe generational attitudinal changes.”
Gallup Polling shows forty-four percent of young women ages eighteen to twenty-nine identify as liberal , the highest number in two decades. However, only a quarter of young men identify as liberal. As shown below, the share of young men who consider themselves liberal has fluctuated over the past 25 years but is overall declining, while the share of young women who consider themselves liberal has steadily climbed. Chart, line chartDescription automatically generated
Younger men are also rejecting cultural liberalism according to research out of the Southern Poverty Law Center – an organization that could never be accused of a conservative bias. The survey found nearly half of Democrat men (47%) under age 50 believe “gender ideology has corrupted American culture” while only 20% of Democrat men over age 50 agree.
Younger Democrats also take the position that the transgender movement is a threat to children, with 42% of younger Democrat men saying that the transgenderism is a threat to children and 40% saying it is “trying to indoctrinate children.”
There is a vast generational divide among Democrat men when it comes to views on radical feminism. While only 2% of Boomer liberal men agree that “feminism has done more harm than good”, nearly half (46%) of young male Democrats, say feminism has done more harm than good in its current state. The polling results indicate Democrat men under 50 now oppose feminism at slightly higher rates than Republican men over 50.
A Meredith College poll from 2022 also shows while Gen Z does hold more liberal positions on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ issues young men hold significantly less liberal views than young women. Polling shows almost half of Gen Z voters want to expand abortion access, compared to just 29% of Millennials. However, that view is primarily driven by young women. Zoomer men are much less amenable to expanding abortion access than Gen Z women.
The Meredith College data also shows a significant share of Gen Z men hold a more traditional view of gender roles. Over 40% of young men said they prefer a male political leader while 35% of Gen Z women prefer a female political leader. Gen Z men preferred a male political leader at the highest rate of any age group. Professor David McLennan who directed the poll, said:
“The results from our work suggest there is a strong conservative element within Gen Z on policy issues…a shift to more traditional views among the male population.”
The mainstream left and right are both ignoring a glaring indicator that young men are not on board the woke train. While young men and women share similar concerns about economic issues, they diverge on gender and identity politics. This divergence has the potential to have a dramatic impact in future elections and could in just a few years become the dominate challenge in electoral politics.

Bill Wilson is the former president of Americans for Limited Government.

If I had to nominate one sound that epitomized the history of south Louisiana, I would be mightily tempted to suggest the chuff-chuff, chuff-chuff, chuff-chuff-chuff of a steam locomotive leaning into its load as it pulled out of a depot or freight yard.
The railroad opened the prairies to new settlements and brought modern times to old towns, and steam locomotives made it happen. They are inexorably linked with who we are and how we got (sometimes literally) to be where we are. They were the engines of commerce for more than a century.
That’s why I paused nostalgically when I recently came across a photograph from the front page of the Bunkie Record of March 13, 1953. It showed nine steam locomotives, hitched in tandem, passing through town. The headline below told the story: “Last Nine Steam Engines on T&P Line, Louisiana Division, on the Way to Scrap Pile.”
They weren’t the last steam engines to be seen in south Louisiana — the “Iron Horses” pulled some Southern Pacific trains at least for another few years — but, as the Record reported, “the charge against these locomotives is obsolescence” and the verdict for others like them was fast approaching.
“Unquestionably this is progress,” the Record said. “The old must give way to the new and modern. … Thus the reason for the passing of the old steam locomotives and the inauguration of … the Diesel, which is far more comfortable, easier to maneuver, moves with less noise, and has considerably more power.”
All of that was true. Diesels were less expensive to operate, more powerful, and didn’t require huge water tanks all along the line to keep them running. But they were never as romantic, at least to me, as the sleek, slim steam engines that pulled the Sunset Limited across Louisiana or the sturdy ones that used a spur track just blocks from my house to pull freight to the port pf Lake Charles.
Even those more mundane, workaday engines had a bit of romance about them that made me want to be a railroad engineer, at least for a time.
You could tell that those engines were powerful just by looking at them. But they weren’t powerful enough. A railroad executive told the Alexandria Town Talk in August 1953 that the average steam locomotive could pull about 50 cars. The diesels could pull twice that. “We can travel 500 miles without refueling and get more work done in less time,” he said. “The noise and dirt of the old engines are gone and the diesels are easier for the engineer to operate.”
Even a math challenged guy like me can figure the economics involved here. But, as I remember, that noise — steam hissing, bells clanging, iron wheels on iron rails — was part of the steam locomotive’s allure. I was apparently not the only one who thought so. Hundreds of songs have tried to capture the clackety-clack of a moving train or the mournful sound of a steam whistle from far across the prairie.
I had the same kind of fascination with the tugboats that pushed big freighters around at the port, but the trains were more accessible. I would always change my bike-riding route and head for the tracks when I heard a train coming.
I got to know the individual locomotives by their numbers and the engineers who leaned out their windows by sight, especially the ones who gave a little toot on the whistle when they saw me.
Sometimes I’d put a penny on the track for the train to run over and flatten it into the size of a silver dollar. I can still remember my panic when I did it the first time, and suddenly feared that my little coin might derail the engine.
Thankfully, it never did.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.

On Friday, parents of students who attend Excelsior College Preparatory Academy (formerly Williams Scholar Academy) received a letter from Rev. Allen R, Randle Sr. informing them that the charter school will be closing its doors this week.
The process to transfer some 70 students who attend Excelsior College Preparatory back into Abbeville and New Iberia schools began on Monday and will continue for a few days.
In Friday’s letter, Rev. Allen wrote, “Due to unfortunate circumstances beyond the control of the teachers, faculty, staff, and board members, Excelsior College Preparatory Academy will relinquish its charter effective Friday (Feb. 10) after appropriate board action. Rather than revoking the charter, we chose to relinquish it to avoid consequences.”
The Louisiana Department of Education had planned to strip the school of its charter had the school not given it up on Friday.
“Our oversight process worked to detect financial and academic concerns. As a result, their board has made the right decision to relinquish its charter in advance of our recommendation for revocation, said Ted Beasley, the executive director of public affairs from the Louisiana Department of Education.
The process to begin closing the school started on Monday. A meeting was scheduled to take place with the parents at 5 p.m.
Rev. Allen said the charter school will remain open and operating “until the last student is placed into another school.”
Superintendent Tommy Byler got word about the closing of the school on Friday. He began speaking with the state department of education officials about the timetable the public schools will start inheriting 25 students from Excelsior College Preparatory. Byler was expected to attend the meeting on Monday at the charter school to inform them of the process of transferring their children into the public school system.
He also met with the six seniors who were scheduled to graduate this May.
Excelsior is a charter school for grades 6th to 12 grade. It was located at the old LightHouse School, south of Abbeville. It had students from Iberia and Vermilion parishes.
BESE granted Excelsior its charter in 2020. After that, students attended the old Lighthouse School until a new school was built on Martin Luther King Drive, where the old Herod High School once stood.
The old Herod High School, which has been closed for more than 40 years, was torn down by Vermilion Shell and Limestone on Feb. 24, 2021. The original plan was to place a new two-story charter school, costing millions of dollars, on the grounds of the old Herod school.