Kentucky Crossroads

12/25/2025

Merry Christmas from Kentucky Crossroads

May this season bring you peace, reflection, and renewed hope, and may the coming year be filled with purpose, prosperity, and opportunity.

12/22/2025

🎄Christmas is not just a celebration. It is a measure.

🎁In this Christmas Day commentary, I reflect on faith, governance, and the moral foundations that made ordered liberty possible—and what happens when a nation forgets them.

🔔Christmas and the Measure of a Nation

📖 Read at Kentucky Crossroads: https://kentuckycrossroads.us/commentary/f/christmas-and-the-measure-of-a-nation

12/18/2025

In Memoriam: Norman Podhoretz (1930–2025)

Kentucky Crossroads honors the life and legacy of Norman Podhoretz, a towering figure in American intellectual life, who passed away on December 16, 2025, at the age of 95.

Born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrant parents, Podhoretz rose from modest beginnings to become one of the most influential editors, writers, and cultural critics of his generation. Educated at Columbia University and Cambridge, he entered public life through literature and criticism before emerging as one of the most formidable voices in American political thought.

At just 30 years old, he became editor-in-chief of Commentary magazine, a position he held for 35 years. Under his leadership, Commentary became a central forum for serious debate and a defining platform for what came to be known as neoconservatism—grounded in moral clarity, a defense of Western civilization, and an unwavering belief in America’s responsibility to confront tyranny.

Podhoretz’s intellectual journey—from postwar liberalism to principled conservatism—was marked by seriousness, rigor, and an unwillingness to accommodate fashionable illusions. He believed that culture shapes politics, that ideas carry consequences, and that the survival of freedom requires not only vigilance, but the courage to defend it.

His voice was unapologetic. His standards were exacting. His influence endures.

May his memory be a blessing—and a summons to intellectual courage in an age that desperately needs it.

May God comfort my friend John and his family, and his sister Ruthie and her family, during this difficult time.

12/16/2025

A republic doesn’t collapse when elections end—it collapses when lawmaking fails.

Congress now passes fewer laws than at any point in modern history. As legislators retreat, presidents govern by decree—temporary, reversible, and unstable. Rome followed this path long before Caesar.

Decree Over Law
https://kentuckycrossroads.us/commentary/f/before-the-rubicon-executive-power-the-decline-of-the-republic

12/07/2025

Today we remember Pearl Harbor — not only as a moment of shock and sacrifice, but as a lesson written in blood.

When America fails to lead, darkness advances.

When tyrants are unchallenged, war follows.

When free nations hesitate, aggression fills the void.

December 7, 1941 teaches us that isolation is not peace —
that evil, left unchecked, grows bold.

As we face a world threatened by authoritarian regimes, expansionist powers, terrorism, and nuclear ambition, the memory of Pearl Harbor speaks with urgency:

America must lead — not for conquest, but for the defense of freedom and the preservation of peace.

We honor the fallen of Pearl Harbor by remembering their courage —
and by refusing to forget the lesson their sacrifice carved into the soul of this nation.

Peace is not the absence of conflict;
it is the presence of strength, resolve, and moral clarity.

May we live up to the duty they died defending.

12/06/2025

America was built on the backs of miners — men and women who worked in the dark so America could shine.

Today we honor them.

Their grit. Their sacrifice. Their legacy.
God bless the miners of Kentucky — yesterday, today, and always. ⛏️🖤

12/03/2025

A special commentary from Andrew McNeill, President of KYFREE, on the upcoming '26 Session of the General Assembly.

The ‘26 Budget Session Begins in the State House

12/03/2025

🚨 NEW COMMENTARY: “When Safe Seats Send Up Flares.”

Tennessee just sent the political equivalent of a distress signal into the Kentucky sky—and Kentucky would be foolish to ignore it.

In a district Trump won by 20+, Democrats nearly closed the gap to single digits.

Not because the GOP collapsed.
But because Democrats out-worked, out-organized, and out-focused Republicans in a race Republicans treated as automatic.

That flare in Tennessee is a warning shot for Kentucky’s 2026 landscape:

-An open U.S. Senate race for the first time in a generation.

-An open KY-06 seat that is shifting under our feet.

-A 40-year political machine in KY-05 facing realities it can no longer outrun.

-And a rising post-liberal faction inside the GOP that threatens conservatism itself.

This commentary is my most expansive analysis yet—how we arrived here, what the Tennessee special election really means, and why 2026 is shaping up to be the most important midterm Kentucky has faced in decades.

The question is simple: Will Kentucky wake up before the margins close?

Read here → https://kentuckycrossroads.us/commentary/f/when-safe-seats-send-up-flares

Kentucky Crossroads
Where truth meets consequence.

What Tennessee’s Special Election Teaches Kentucky About 2026, Conservatism, and the Coming Judgment on a Party in Drift

12/02/2025

NEW COMMENTARY: “When Leaders Trade Truth for a Vision That Fails”

For years, Kentucky’s political class has sold the people of Eastern Kentucky a comforting lie — the myth that Appalachia is experiencing an “in-migration revival.”

The truth is harder, and far more important:

📉 Most Appalachian counties are still losing people.
📉 Entire communities face 30%–50% population collapse by 2050.
📉 What politicians call “growth” is often just our own people being pushed from one county into another.
📉 Internal drift is being disguised as a comeback — and families are paying the price.

This isn’t a revival. It’s a vision that has failed, repackaged as success.

In my latest Kentucky Crossroads commentary, I break down the numbers, expose the political spin, and explain why Eastern Kentucky deserves honest leadership — not illusions, not press releases, and not another generation of excuses.

Read the full piece here:
👉 https://kentuckycrossroads.us/commentary/f/when-leaders-trade-truth-for-a-vision-that-fails

If you’re tired of watching Frankfort claim “momentum” while our communities disappear, this one’s for you. Share it. Talk about it. Let the truth be louder than the spin.

It’s time to confront reality — and fight for an Appalachian future built on truth.

11/26/2025

We Give Thanks in the Mountains

This Thanksgiving, Kentucky Crossroads goes home—to the mountains, to the Big Sandy Valley, and to the tables where generations of Eastern Kentuckians carved out a culture rooted in faith, family, and endurance.

Our latest commentary is a meditation on gratitude forged in hardship, the spiritual resilience of the Appalachian people, and the ancestral memory that still rises from the creeks and hollers of Pike County.

In a year when Kentucky stands at a crossroads, this reflection reminds us of who we are, where we came from, and the God who has never left the mountains.

Read the full commentary here:
👉 https://kentuckycrossroads.us/commentary/f/we-give-thanks-in-the-mountains

May your Thanksgiving be filled with grace, memory, and the peace that only comes from home.

— Roger Ford, Editor | Kentucky Crossroads

by Roger D. Ford, M.A., Editor

11/24/2025

🔥 Kentucky’s Electric Bills Are Rising — But Not for the Reason Facebook Says 🔥

A post has been making the rounds blaming data centers for the skyrocketing electric bills in Eastern Kentucky. The frustration is real — but the explanation is dead wrong, and it’s distracting us from the reforms that would actually fix our problem.

Here’s the truth:

📌 Data centers aren’t the reason your bill is $300–$1,000 a month.
📌 Kentucky’s outdated monopoly system is.
📌 And Frankfort has refused to fix it.
📌 The core culprit? The Kentucky General Assembly.

Kentucky is one of the last states still trapped in an old-school monopoly model where we cannot choose our power supplier, cannot access cheaper competitive contracts, and cannot build new local generation without the PSC’s permission.

So what happens?

When PJM market prices spike… we get hit.
When old coal plants retire… we get hit.
When industrial load disappears… we get hit.
When AEP has fixed costs but fewer customers left to share them… we get hit again.
When Kentucky Power games the regulatory for maximum profits...we get hit, hit, and hit again.

And because Frankfort still blocks competition, Eastern Kentucky families get stuck subsidizing an obsolete system.

Meanwhile, states like Ohio, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas are lowering everyone’s rates by attracting new industry, new generation, and alternative power providers.

Kentucky could do the same — if legislators opened the market and reformed the PSC.

We don’t need to blame data centers.
We need to demand legislators represent us, not the public utility monopoly. We need legislators to refuse donations from utility executives and their PACs.

If we want lower bills, cheaper power, and economic revival, the path is simple:

✔️ Open competition for large power users
✔️ Allow independent power producers in EKY
✔️ Modernize the PSC
✔️ Build new local generation (including waste-to-energy, solar+storage, hydro, coal and gas, SMRs) that can also put revenue in local government coffers
✔️ Stop forcing families to pay for a broken monopoly system

I’ve written a full, fact-based breakdown — including what’s really driving prices and the reforms that would actually lower your bill — over at Kentucky Crossroads.

👉 Read the full commentary here: https://kentuckycrossroads.us/commentary/f/the-real-reason-eastern-kentuckians-face-crushing-power-bills

Eastern Kentucky deserves the truth — and real solutions. Not another distraction.

11/22/2025

There are moments when history leaves no room for illusion.
The newly proposed 28-point “peace plan” for Ukraine is one of them.

While it is being marketed as a diplomatic breakthrough, its substance reveals something far more dangerous: a negotiated surrender that rewards Russian aggression, weakens Ukraine, undermines NATO, and invites a far greater conflict in the future.

In our latest Kentucky Crossroads commentary—“The Peace That Guarantees War”— Ford examines the plan through the lens of history, from Munich to the Cold War, and draw on the warnings of leaders like Newt Gingrich, Senator Mitch McConnell, and Senator Roger Wicker, who have all condemned this proposal as reckless and destabilizing.

The question before us is simple:
Will America stand for a just peace—or repeat the mistakes that once plunged the world into darkness?

Read the full commentary here:
https://kentuckycrossroads.us/commentary/f/the-peace-that-guarantees-war