Our family is in the middle of a financial crisis. In mid-July, Stephen Stone—president and editor of RenewAmerica.com—was rushed to the hospital due to excruciating pains in his stomach. In the months just prior, he had been throwing up frequently and had lost 40 lbs in rapid succession. Through an endoscopy, it was found that he had an ulcer and blockage in his duodenum, a digestive organ that connects his stomach to his small intestine.

On July 19, Stephen was in the hospital for four days with tubes in his nose—intended to drain his stomach and to feed his intestines. When it seemed he was on the mend, he was released from the hospital on July 23, but he still had a feeding tube in his nose since doctors didn't want him to eat or drink anything by mouth for three weeks, except for fruit-based popsicles. His wife DeeAnn filled the bags hooked to the feeding tube with nutritional “formula” (provided by a home health supplier), as well as water, and maintained the pump for him, often getting only a few hours of sleep before she had to get up and refill the feeding bags. This was a 24/7 job, she soon learned.

On August 19, 2026, Steve went in for another endoscopy, where it was found that his ulcer had completely healed, although his duodenum was evidently still partially blocked. The doctor slightly stretched the opening using a dilation device, but said Steve would need to come back in a couple of weeks to have another endoscopy done to see how much he’d improved. If it was still blocked, he might need to have surgery. Meanwhile, he was put on a strictly liquid diet.

Compounding his problem is the fact that Steve has a large bilateral inguinal hernia that needs to be operated on, something he has lived with for several years that has lately become quite painful. The hernia was apparently caused by a local gravel supplier who ignored Steve's wishes and delivered 13 tons of crushed concrete far from where it was needed for the floor of the Stone family home's large solarium, requiring Steve and his son Callan to move all 13 tons by hand, using shovels and a medium-sized wheel barrow, a difficult task that took several weeks to perform roughly ten years ago. Thankfully, Callan was evidently not injured.

With Steve’s ambulance and hospitalization costs combined, the medical bills are piling up, which will go higher after he receives additional treatment, including repairing his hernia. For this reason, we are asking our readers and writers for help. If you could send us a modest donation, that would greatly help us pay down these expenses.

• GoFundMe

• An easy way to make a donation would be to send it directly to Steve’s PayPal account using his email address (editor@renewamerica.com).

• DeeAnn Stone's Venmo account

• If you’d rather send a check, you could send it to:
  Stephen Stone
  PO Box 50502
  Provo, UT 84605-0502
  

  Please let us know if you send a check, by emailing Stephen at the above email address, so we'll know when to visit our PO box in town.

OVERVIEW OF STEVE'S POLITICAL WORK and how Steve's political work led to the creation of EAGLE MOUNTAIN—Utah's third largest city in terms of land mass.

For more than 30 years, Stephen has been actively engaged in high-intensity political work that centers in correcting social trends that ignore the foundational principles of "Americanism" upon which the United States was founded. At the outset, this work included three years of intense effort required to overturn an oppressive 40-acre zone imposed by Utah County in 1983 that changed the original one-acre zone that had been in place since World War II to 40 acres—an extreme land-use requirement designed to change the very nature of the County—which at the time WAS THE MOST CONSERVATIVE region in the state. After the 40-acre zone was dropped by the County, a large well-planned community named Eagle Mountain naturally sprang up in 1996 in northern Utah County, thanks to three out-of-state developers who took an interest in this beautiful region of the state after the arbitrary 40-acre zone was replaced with a more reasonable 5 1/4-acre zone, due to Stephen's written and spoken arguments (and the support of a handful of reasonable County officials, including an influential County Commissioner who was soon to become the state's governor).

A year later, the adjacent city of Saratoga Springs was created just east of Eagle Mountain, on land that was once a modest resort on the edge of large, attractive Utah Lake. Eagle Mountain (incorporated in 1996) and sister-city Saratoga Springs (incorporated in 1997) have since become prime development areas in the state.

BACK TO STEPHEN'S CONDITION

After Stephen had his fourth endoscopy on August 19, he was progressing fine, his stomach had no pain, he had gained five pounds, and he was even able to drive a car occasionally.

Then, he went in for a follow-up endoscopy on September 8 to have the duodenum stretched again. After the procedure, the doctor said Steve should come back in four weeks to see how the duodenum was healing, and he put Steve on a “low residue diet."

Unfortunately, unlike the previous endoscopies when Steve had no side effects, after the September 8 endoscopy Steve was in pain for 2-3 days from the procedure, had a fever, and brain fog. He lost his appetite, which caused him to lose more weight and become weak and malnourished, and he spoke only in a whisper.

The doctor’s office called him on September 16 to schedule his next endoscopy, but because of Steve's weakened condition, we told the office we needed to schedule it for later. A few days after that, Steve began throwing up, which worsened to the point he started spitting up blood.

Seeing the urgency of his condition, on Sunday, September 20, we and our EMT son Callan drove Steve to the ER once again, where they pumped his stomach and put him on IVs to restore the nutrients he had lost so he could regain his strength. He underwent a fifth endoscopy during which another feeding tube was installed, which ended up being kinked, so none of the formula they were giving him for nutrition was passing through. He had to undergo another procedure the next day to straighten out the tube. After that, things worked fine and he was released from the hospital on Thursday, September 24.

The doctor said that if the duodenum wasn’t healed in 2-4 weeks from his discharge date, a robotic-assisted laparoscopic surgery would need to be used to repair the duodenum. Originally, they were going to put a stent in, but the doctor said their stents were too large for what Steve needed, so surgery was likely the only answer.

As of September 27, DeeAnn is helping Steve once again with his feeding through a pump and nasal tube. He is regaining his strength and is able to walk around on his own. Hopefully, if the duodenum heals this time, he won’t need surgery to his duodenum. Time will tell.

MORE ON STEPHEN'S HISTORY OF WORK-RELATED STRESS

For many years, Stephen Stone has been dealing with considerable stress and health issues that have likely affected his digestive system. Over time, these influences have been getting increasingly worse—beginning about 25 years ago when our family was confronted with blatantly illegal interference with our family's work for Alan Keyes by some of Dr. Keyes' detractors, in the form of threats and intimidation at one point that cost us considerable money, but which, by law, could have required the perpetrators to spend a minimum of one year in jail (or doing the equivalent in court-ordered community service) and pay a fine of $2,500 each under Utah law (see Utah Code 76-8-104; see also Class A Misdemeanor Utah Code Section 76-3-204). By our figuring, these unlawful stresses upon Stephen, some of which amounted to nonstop threats that were intended to end his political efforts, so distracted him that he paid a considerable emotional price for staying the course of his dedicated political work, greatly affecting his daily health, apparently causing his duodenum to rupture in 2011, a situation that required emergency major surgery—not only to repair his duodenum, as noted, but to also remove his diseased gall bladder and appendix.

Note that adding to the difficulty imposed by this unjust illegal interference that we as family suffered during those years as we were doing a great deal of national campaigning was the fact that at the same time we were helping Dr. Keyes share his political vision with America, we were also building our family's home entirely by ourselves on a 10.5-acre farm we acquired largely as a by-product of Steve's earlier work changing the above-cited 40-acre zone in Utah County, coupled with modest inheritances we received upon the deaths of DeeAnn's and Stephen's parents.

We believe it is clear that the above-mentioned nonstop illegal stresses that violated our family's principled work logically appear to have caused Stephen to suffer a major ulcer that eventually ruptured and nearly took his life in July 2011, a situation, as noted above, that required emergency surgery not only to repair his duodenum, but also to remove his diseased gall bladder and appendix.

After recovering from that difficult crisis, Stephen was doing fine for about a dozen years, but then in 2022, disturbing symptoms started recurring and he sought help at a nearby InstaCare facility. They prescribed acid-blocking Omeprazole and sent him on his way. But then on October 13, 2023, he began throwing up and had terrible pain in his stomach. So he was taken to the local hospital’s ER to see if they could identify what was wrong. They did two CT scans and found inflammation in the duodenal loop that suggested a peptic ulcer or doudenitis—more of the same problem as before that wasn’t really addressed. They suggested he stay on Omeprazole, which he did for several months.

For quite some time, Stephen has coped with recurring discomfort and pain in his right side. Then starting in 2023, when we were appealing our property taxes—a difficult enough challenge by itself that was made more difficult by the fact that we were already suffering from lack of sleep due to the demands of operating RenewAmerica in the face of the unusual political challenges facing our country (many of which still keep us up late at night)—Steve's symptoms were made worse by the innate unfairness of the appeal process, creating even more distraction and pain for him, as it turned out that dealing with bureaucratic-minded County property tax officials and state tax officials has proven to be an eye-opening nightmare to our patriotic family designed to favor the bureaucratic thinking of government officials above the God-centered rights and genuine needs of normal citizens.

The challenges caused by the illegal interference with our family's political work that had plagued our family for years became especially disturbing and disheartening during the 2007-8 presidential election, when our family ran the nationalpresidential campaign of Alan Keyes, with Stephen as the CEO and DeeAnn as the Director of Communications of the campaign. The blatantly illegal interference we encountered—which, incidentally, never let up and was basically a constant phenomenon, lasting even after the election ended—took a definite toll on Steve, DeeAnn, and our entire family, because of our loyalty to the incomparable statesman Alan Keyes and his patriotic, God-premised message, a public cause for which we were willing to make significant sacrifices.

Unfortunately, at the time the illegal interference began, we lacked the funds and competent legal help to counter that interference, and by the time we finally understood the true nature and scope of that interference, a statute of limitations prevented us from taking legal action. The statute of limitations enabled us a window of only five years for taking any legal action.

FALLING IN THE SHOWER

Years later, in January 2026, Steve fell in the shower, landing on his face and creating further injury to his back as he tried to get up. He tried for an hour to get out of the shower, but no one in the house was aware of what had happened to him. His face became badly swollen when he bruised himself on the abrasive shower drain. Eventually, DeeAnn found him and gave him the help he needed. Unfortunately, this was the beginning of his most recent decline, which has lasted most of the current year.

By May 2026, the pain in Steve’s right side unexpectedly increased, and he began throwing up frequently. In fact, on Mother’s Day, he almost threw up at church, but fortunately he was able to control his symptoms until he got home. From then on, he became too weak to attend church regularly. By July, he had lost 30-40 lbs and become very thin—almost emaciated. By July 19, 2026, Steve was in so much pain and so weak that he was taken again to the local hospital’s ER, as described above.

Again, please send Stephen a gift of any size to help with his medical expenses to:

• GoFundMe

• Steve’s PayPal account using his email address (editor@renewamerica.com)—that would especially help.

• DeeAnn Stone's Venmo account

• If you’d rather send a check, you could send it to:
  Stephen Stone
  PO Box 50502
  Provo, UT 84605-0502
  

Heavenly performance by Malakai Bayoh of "Pie Jesu" on Britain's Got Talent

Stephen at work at his desk in the family's self-built home, which has been under construction since the early 1990s as a "homeschool project"—and which currently provides at least part-time housing for eleven family members, including Stephen and DeeAnn and their eighth child, Callan (an advanced EMT), his wife Julie, their five small children, and Julie's parents, Jay and Nancy (after Jay received a liver transplant in April 2025).

(Note that building our own home has led to useful employment for at least five of our children, one of whom is the manager of a plumbing, heating, and cooling business belonging to long-time family friend Parley Hellewell).

Beginning in late 1999, the Stephen Stone family became the official representatives of the Alan Keyes for President campaign in Utah—leading to nearly a decade of being involved in Alan Keyes' multi-faceted quest for the U.S. presidency, a quest the family officially led the last installment of, beginning in the summer of 2007. It was during this roughly eight-year period that RenewAmerica was launched as a vehicle for getting the conservative message of Alan Keyes to the American public.

Constitutional scholar W. Cleon Skousen introduces Alan Keyes at a Utah Valley State College rally on March 8, 2000, in the same facility where the recent CHARLIE KIRK MEMORIAL was held September 26, 2026.

FINALLY, see Steve's February 25, 2025, article—"The property tax is corrupting America" (Stephen Stone)—as well as the following related news items:

• TRUMP'S 'ECONOMIC FAIRNESS PLAN' calls for an end to property taxes across the U.S. (AMG News, December 23, 2025)

• The Florida Legislature has ADVANCED Gov. Ron DeSantis' Constitutional amendment abolishing property taxes for primary homeowners, with both Senate and House committees taking votes [VIDEO] (X.com, June 1, 2026)

• PROPERTY TAX RELIEF: Donald Trump Demands ‘No More Property Taxes Across The United States!’ – 6 states cutting property taxes to zero [VIDEO] (X.com, April 11, 2026)

• Trump wants to cut taxes. So do governors and lawmakers in some states (AP News, January 17, 2025)

• Trump: I want no more property taxes across the United States! (Facebook, July 3, 2025)

• These 6 states might eliminate property taxes (realtor.com, April 1, 2026)

• "TEACH YOUR OWN: Don't give them over to secular agents of government" (Stephen Stone, June 18, 2024, updated April 24, 2025)

MUST SEE: ARCHIVED VIDEO CLIPS FROM JULY 5, 2004, ALAN KEYES 'FAITH AND FREEDOM FAIR' AT UVSC, WHICH ALAN OSMOND—ALONG WITH 9/11 SURVIVOR LORALEE ARMSTRONG NUNLEY and 'THE OSMONDS SECOND GENERATION'—HEADLINED (in the same large facility where the recent Charlie Kirk memorial was held September 26, 2026)

KSL: Utah flight attendant LORALEE ARMSTRONG NUNLEY was almost on September 11 flight (ksl.com)

PEOPLE MAGAZINE: Where are the Osmonds now? (people.com)

ALAN OSMOND’S FAMILY: All About the Late Musician's Wife and 8 Kids (people.com)