The World and Everything in It: February 27, 2023

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Big Tech is accused of having aided terrorists because of the way it serves up online content. But there is that liability protection under federal law.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Also … the Monday Moneybeat. Today … some new data on consumer prices. And listener questions on the fed and two-paycheck families.

And the WORLD History Book…today, speeches of former US President Jimmy Carter.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, February 27th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

REICHARD: Time now for the news. Here’s Kent Covington.

Ukraine F-16s » The White House says it is ruling out sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine … for now. National security adviser Jake Sullivan told ABC’s This week that what Kyiv needs for this phase of the war are:

SULLIVAN: Tanks, armored personnel carriers, infantry fighting vehicles. And so, what the president is saying is that he’s focused on those capabilities, and the F-16 question is a question for later.

But House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul said he believes the U-S can and should do more now. He said he recently met with military brass at a security conference in German.

MCCAUL: They’re all in favor of us putting not only F-16s in but longer range artillery to take out Iranian drones in Crimea.

He said in his view, holding back some of the weapons Ukraine is asking for only serves to prolong the war.

Ukraine on the ground latest » Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he’s open to a peace plan that China proposed for ending the war. The plan calls for Russia to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty.

But Ukrainian lawmaker Kira Rudik says China’s peace plan may not be an option.

RUDIK - The only way that we see right now, for us to end the war is to win the war, to restore our sovereignty, and then to figure out the way of how to make sure that Russia would not attack us again.

CIA director on Ukraine / China » Even while China is proposing a peace plan in Ukraine… The U-S government suspects it is also thinking about selling weapons to Russia.

CIA Director William Burns:

BURNS - We're confident that the Chinese leadership is considering the provision of lethal equipment. We also don't see that a final decision has been made yet. And we don't see evidence of actual shipments of lethal equipment

Burns also acknowledged that China could be trying to turn the West’s preoccupation with the war in Ukraine to its own advantage.

BURNS - it's conceivable, but I think there's no foreign leader who's watched more carefully Vladimir Putin's experience in Ukraine the evolution of the war than Xi Jinping has.

Meanwhile, US intelligence says China is preparing to invade Taiwan by 2027. But Burns says some Chinese leaders also now doubt their ability to successfully take control of the island.

Israel Palestinian talks » Israeli and Palestinian leaders are promising to work toward lasting peace as bloodshed continues in and around the West Bank. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, REPORTER: The Jordanian government has been mediating peace talks, and announced over the weekend that both sides affirm the need to de-escalate the conflict.

But violence spiked almost immediately after the announcement, when a Palestinian gunman killed two Israeli citizens in the West Bank.

[NETANYAHU - Speaking in Hebrew]

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded for calm as Israeli rioters set fire to numerous cars and homes and assaulted Palestinians in the settlement of Huwara.

The Palestinian Health Ministry said Israeli gunfire killed one person. At least four other people were wounded.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

Rough Weather across the US » Thousands of people in Michigan are still without power… after severe winter storms destroyed power lines in the Detroit area.

Michanders are used to rough winters. But southern Californians? Not so much.

One resident along the Santa Clara River just north of LA said Sunday …

MOS: I can’t get to work right now because of the snow. And also I’m kind of afraid that we’re going to have to evacuate if it gets any worse.

The winter blast slammed Southern California on Saturday.

Meanwhile rain and snow are falling again in Northern California.

Zack Taylor with the National Weather Service:

TAYLOR - There is another series of storm systems that will begin to move through the West Coast. Over the next couple of days, bringing in additional threat of heavy mountain snow, all the way from the Oregon and Washington cascades down through the Sierra Nevada and California where there could be an additional four to six feet of snowfall likely in the highest year.

Northern California is now under blizzard and winter storm warnings until Wednesday.

An estimated 60,000 Californians were without power on Sunday.

New presidential poll » Former President Trump is the early odds-on favorite for the GOP presidential nomination, according to a new Fox News poll.

Among Republicans in a survey of 1,000 registered voters, 43% said Trump is their preferred candidate.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was second with 28%. Former ambassador Nikki Haley and several others received single-digit support.

The poll suggests history could repeat itself.

Ahead of the 2016 election, with the rest of the field divided … Trump became the first Republican in more than a half century to win the GOP nod without a majority of the primary vote.

I’m Kent Covington.

The Supreme Court hears challenges to Big Tech legal protections. That’s ahead on Legal Docket.

Plus, the WORLD Radio History Book.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Monday February 27th. We’re so glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning! I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Legal Docket. Well, Mary, glad to have you back. We should let the listener in on your whereabouts. Most recently, you were on a busy trip to D.C. with your legal-beagle partner, Jenny Rough. How’d it go?

Really well, thank you. This job has such variety to it, it’s impossible to get bored. So last Wednesday, you know we’ve got our DC headquarters right next to the Supreme Court building, and it's so convenient! Jenny and I caught oral argument that morning, along with other reporters with whom we were crammed into a little tiny space.

But the next day we found ourselves in rural Virginia walking in muck and scratching the backs of pigs. So from the crowded capital city to wide-open spaces.

EICHER: Mary, I see what you’re doing here, just asking for me to make a connection between the Swamp and the Swine, all the mental images, and that would just be wrong. Nevertheless, I hope you brought your farm boots with you to DC.

REICHARD: Haha, oh, we learned the hard way about the very different footwear requirements. Bottom line is we can’t wait to tell you these stories!

EICHER: Very good, well, I just got back from a WORLD board meeting in Montgomery, Alabama, and was able to meet up with some great listeners down there, and the weather was so warm, we enjoyed a meal outdoors. It was great!

You know, I introduce myself as the guy who gets to work with Myrna and Mary. But I did specifically have a listener ask about the Legal Docket case stories, and I showed one of the pictures Jenny snapped of you appearing to interview a farm animal. Photographic proof!

REICHARD: Yes, the handsome pig was expressing contentment with his life in the Virginia countryside. Roughly translated, of course, Jenny Rough does not speak swine. That’s my own interpretation!

EICHER: Well, let’s get to this week’s business. We’ve got an oral argument. But also starting to get some opinions coming in and we have three of those.

Let’s start with Helix Energy Solutions Group, Inc v Hewitt. In this one, a highly-paid employee wins his bid for overtime pay. His employer pointed to the Fair Labor Standards Act … and the reason is that the Act exempts from overtime pay executives such as Michael Hewitt, who earned more than $200,000 a year.

You can hear the eventual ruling in this comment from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson during argument last fall:

JACKSON: What he has to know is how much is coming in at a regular clip so that he can get a babysitter, so that he can hire a nanny, so that he can pay his mortgage. It's about, I think, the predictability and the regularity of payment.

REICHARD: Predictability and regularity are what make all the difference. By a 6-3 vote the justices found Hewitt’s earnings were calculated as a daily rate. If he took a sick day, he would not be paid for that day. Hence, he is not a salaried employee, but instead a daily wage worker (granted, he earns a high wage), therefore entitled to overtime pay.

EICHER: Ok, second opinion: this one is a victory for a man on death row in Arizona.

Under that state’s law, convicted killer John Cruz could have received either the death penalty or a life sentence without parole.

But the jury may not have known that because it was denied notification of that critical fact: that if it chose a life sentence instead of the death penalty, he would still never get out of prison. It’s possible the jurors might have inferred the death penalty was the only option that would keep him from possible release someday.

A split 5-4 bench agreed with Cruz, with an interesting ideological breakdown: the Chief Justice and Justice Brett Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices, and now Cruz will receive a new sentencing hearing.

REICHARD: Alright, final opinion, this one couched in bankruptcy law. Buckley v Bartenwerfer. The court rejected a wife’s bid to use bankruptcy as a way to wipe out debts incurred through fraud, even though it was her husband who deceived creditors. He’d not disclosed defects in a house he remodeled that the couple owned together. The wife argued that because she was not aware of the deception, that she should be able to discharge that debt.

Justice Clarence Thomas underscored the text of the bankruptcy law in question:

THOMAS: It focuses on the debt. And it is in the passive voice, but it's talking about money or debt that's obtained by fraud. How do you convert that into a statute that is focusing on the debtor?

EICHER: Well, you don’t. The law is clear: money obtained by fraud cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. It’s not who did the fraud; it’s how the money was obtained. So a unanimous victory for the home-buyer.

Alright, now on to the Big Tech cases heard last week involving Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. That gives Internet platforms legal immunity for online content.

REICHARD: Right, but let me say at the outset: oral arguments ran nearly six hours total between the two cases over two different days, and they went all over the place. So I’m giving you the super skimmed version!

Also, I’m going to mingle soundbites from both cases, even though the legal questions are different. One asks the contours of a Section 230 defense, by that I mean the immunity Big Tech enjoys from liability of what users say on their platforms. The other goes to the specific question, what does it mean for an internet platform to aid and abet terrorists

EICHER: So different questions but similar facts: each involves a family who sued Big Tech platforms after terrorist attacks in which a loved one was killed. One attack was in Paris, the other at a nightclub in Istanbul, Turkey.

The families argue that Google and Twitter allowed terrorist content online and didn’t take aggressive enough action to stop it. They say algorithms used by Big Tech pushed people into watching ISIS videos online, inspiring some viewers to carry out terrorist acts.

Lisa Blatt was Google’s lawyer. She argued practicalities:

BLATT: All search engines work the same way...It has to be displayed somehow…. So, yeah, they're having to make choices because there could be…a billion hours of videos watched each day on YouTube and 500 hours uploaded every minute, so it's a lot of content on YouTube.

REICHARD: It all has to be organized somehow or else nobody could find anything. Blatt argued surely Google can’t be liable for generally available service that someone somewhere might act upon in an egregious way.

Schnapper for the families argued Google should be responsible for its own algorithms. Those take a person’s viewing habits and then recommend videos based on that information.

SCHNAPPER: Encouraging people to go look at ISIS videos would be aiding and abetting ISIS.

REICHARD: But where’s the limiting principle in that? In other words, think of the precedent.

Schnapper suggested that it would be aiding and abetting terror to give someone the phone number of al-Baghdadi, the former leader of ISIS.

Justice Thomas followed up:

THOMAS: If you called Information and asked for al-Baghdadi's number and they give it to you, I don't see how that's aiding and abetting. And I don't understand how a neutral suggestion about something that you've expressed an interest in is aiding and abetting. I just don't -- I don't understand it. And I'm trying to get you to explain to us how something that is standard on YouTube for virtually anything that you have an interest in suddenly amounts to aiding and abetting because you're in the ISIS category.

REICHARD: Hypotheticals came fast and furious in both cases.Justice Samuel Alito grappled with how specific the online information would need to be to hold Big Tech liable:

ALITO: It’s not necessary that they know there’s going to be an attack on the Reina nightclub, would it matter if it was a different nightclub, would it matter if it was a bombing at some facility in Istanbul during a particular period of time when people would be present and people would be killed? But, at a certain point, it becomes too attenuated to support aiding and abetting. So that's a difficult -- that's a line-drawing problem. Substantiality is also a line-drawing problem. So what is substantial assistance? What's the difference between substantial and insubstantial assistance?

REICHARD: And Justice Elena Kagan:

KAGAN: Suppose this set of facts: That many terrorist organizations use the social media services provided by your client, that they do so to recruit other members…for purposes of enhancing their terrorist activities, that your client knows this because government officials, journalists, other people have pointed it out. Now I'm going to change one fact…. which is that instead of having a policy against this and trying to remove…this various terrorist content, that Twitter had just said, “Let a thousand flowers bloom, we're not going to touch a thing.” But, you know, it knows that all of this is happening, but it…does not have a policy of trying to remove. Then do you fall within the language of the statute?

WAXMAN: I don't think so.

REICHARDThe lawyers representing Big Tech warned against messing up a good thing with Section 230’s protection against lawsuits for online content.

Justices of all stripes seemed quite reluctant to step into this. Again, Justice Thomas:

THOMAS: if we're not pinpointing cause and effect or proximate cause for specific things, then -- and you're focused on infrastructure or just the availability … of these platforms, then it would seem that every terrorist act that uses this platform would also mean that Twitter is … an aider and abettor in those instances?

SCHNAPPER: I think, as you phrase it, the answer would probably be yes, and they would agree the way you phrased it. Let me phrase it differently because I understand the point you’re trying to make.

REICHARD: But lawyer for Twitter, Seth Waxman, ended his time with this reminder:

WAXMAN: Walmart is the largest gun dealer, I believe, in the United States. They know for a certainty that some of the people that buy guns are criminals. Some of them are drug gangs. Some of them are terrorists … . They know that they're there. There's been a newspaper report. The State Department has issued a pronouncement. Nobody would say that they are aiding and abetting particular crimes that happen to be committed by somebody who bought a gun at Walmart.

REICHARD: Guns aside, Justice Kagan asked why Big Tech is treated specially:

KAGAN: Every other industry has to internalize the costs of misconduct. Why is it that the tech industry gets a pass? A little bit unclear. On the other hand, I mean, we're a court. We really don't know about these things. These are not the nine greatest experts on the internet…(laughter)

REICHARD: Perhaps Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed what most of the justices were thinking about these cases:

KAVANAUGH: You're asking us right now to make a very precise predictive judgment that, don't worry about it, it's really not going to be that bad. I don't know that that's at all the case, and I don't know how we can assess that in any meaningful way.

REICHARD: Court watchers [including me] thought these cases spelled big trouble for Big Tech, that they’d lose.

But now I don’t think so, at least not in a big way.

Yet, there’s Congress. A few years back, sex trafficking victims sued the classified ad website called Backpage. They argued Backpage made trafficking them easier and catered to pimps. But the victims lost in court because Section 230 shielded Backpage from liability. That is, until a bipartisan Congress removed sex trafficking from that protection. Backpage is now defunct.

And that’s this week’s Legal Docket.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Next up on The World and Everything in It, the Monday Moneybeat.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s time to talk business, markets, and the economy with financial analyst and adviser David Bahnsen. He’s head of the wealth management firm The Bahnsen Group and he’s here now.

David, good morning!

DAVID BAHNSEN, GUEST: Well, good morning, Nick, good to be with you.

EICHER: Okay, David, right off the top, we got to look at the price index that is said to be the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, it comes from the Commerce Department. It’s not the consumer price index, the CPI that we talked about last week. Instead, we’re talking about the personal consumption expenditures, the PCE for January, that Rose 5.4%. year on year on the headline number, the core PCE was 4.7. And that’s an increase, January over December. So we’re talking about that persistent problem of too high consumer prices. David, what do you take from the PCE Report for January?

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I think that whether it’s the PC, or the CPI, that there is still this issue I’m watching which I kind of don’t think gets cleared up until April or May, and even then it isn’t fully cleared up, it only starts to move the other way, which is that issue we’ve talked about a couple times regarding how housing prices and particularly rent is reflected that it’s still showing, as if that number is going higher, when everybody knows it is going lower. And the reason for that is just simply the anomaly of how it has to be measured, which might be a little too complicated or, or wonky for our purposes. But that issue is distortive in one sense. But even with that said, I do think the PCE number was a tad higher than had been expected—not by much. We were looking at a headline level of point 5% And ended up being point six and so 1/10 of a percent higher. And so you just are still kind of in the same limbo where goods prices continue to come down, energy and food prices are volatile—which is why we have a difference between core and headline—and then the shelter prices are just in my mind suffering from a lag effect.

EICHER: Alright, staying on the PCE report. David, I want to read a quote from a Fed President. This comes from an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Loretta Mester of the Cleveland Fed said this: “Inflation is too high. We have inflation pressures that are pretty ‘in there.’” And this was in quotation marks, to sort of emphasize that the inflation pressures are pretty ‘in there.’ And so let me just let that sit and let it serve as a lead-in to our first listener question:

SAM BURNETT: Good morning, Nick and David. My name is Sam Burnett from Abbeville, South Carolina. I would first like to thank David for being a living example of what is taught in Genesis 2:15. Now to my question: Are people like Jerome Powell trying to establish the correct inflation rate in order to devalue the debt over years or decades but yet not crush the economy? Thank you very much.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, I mean, I think that there’s a couple of things going on. As a general rule, I am a different kind of Fed critic than a lot of the more high profile and more inflammatory Fed critics who are out there, in that I am overwhelmingly and consistently critical of a monetary policy that is too, shall we say, arrogant—that is trying to get a central bank to do more than I think it ought to do. And yet, I do not believe that that stems from them having bad motives. I believe that our central bankers basically do believe, economically, that they have the ability to do something that I don’t believe they have the ability to do.

So when we talk about Powell’s motives, he is not on the political side, he is on the central bank side. And I believe whether you’re in Japan, Europe, America, since the Great Depression, every central banker I’ve ever studied exists to fight against deflation, the fact that they simply know that they cannot do anything once you get into a debt deflation cycle. And that whether it is the great financial crisis, whether it was the lessons learned out of the Great Depression, the things that have taken place out in Japan that are well-documented and quite severe over the last 30 years, and even the response to the COVID pandemic, central bankers go all in on what they believe could be deflationary problems that always stem from excessive debt. Inflation is the stated purpose of the Fed, they are to produce a nice stable value of money. And so of course they have to say that they are concerned about inflation. But I know I do not believe that Chairman Powell is sitting around thinking about the fact that inflation helps to devalue the debt. I think the political class thinks about that, and I think Powell knows that the government needs to afford their debt, and with a higher cost of capital would not be able to. So they’re in a very sticky situation, and I believe that setting an inflation target of 2%, which is what they’ve had for a number of years, and they couldn't get up to 2% inflation for 15 years. And yet, even a 2% target to me is not the same thing as stable money.

And so I don’t think they should be targeting to have an inflation rate that cuts purchasing power in half every 36 years, which is what a 2% inflation rate does. And nor do I think right now that Powell has the ability to get us down to 2% inflation because I don’t think this is primarily about the cost of capital. So I know I’ve put a lot out there and I hope that there’s some takeaways in there that are useful to answering the question, but I want there to be that nuance when we think about the Fed I want us to have an intelligent, Christian oriented commitment to sound money critique of the Fed, but I don’t want it to get carried away to conspiracy theories that I think are really unhelpful.

EICHER: Okay, last question. Today, David comes from listener John Hildebrant.

HILDEBRANT: Good morning, Mr. Bahnsen. When my wife and I got married nearly 19 years ago, we committed to one another and to the Lord that if we had any children, she would stay home and raise them full time, rather than entering the workforce. Early on, of course, this made many things difficult to afford, like homeownership. And so I've wondered since then, how this decades-long trend of women entering the full-time workforce has affected the economy. Thanks so much for all that you do.

BAHNSEN: Yeah, you know, this is not something you’re probably ever going to hear me say again, but you know who wrote one of the best books on this subject was Elizabeth Warren. And it was when she was a much more moderate, probably let’s call it center-left public figure well before she was in politics, she was an academic. And she wrote a book called The Two-Income Trap. And just talking economically, not theologically or domestically or culturally, but economically, she pointed out that one of the economic side effects to two income families, which essentially means that we had gone from primarily men as the breadwinners to now having an awful lot of two income families. And at the time she wrote this book, it may have been about 60, or 70%, it’s now of course, gotten up much higher than that. But she pointed out that it embedded a cost structure that essentially enabled there to be two incomes that can now service a monthly payment on a mortgage, and two incomes that could serve as a monthly payment on a car. And it embedded a higher cost structure for an automobile and housing. And I don’t believe she was saying it as a criticism or concluding that women shouldn’t work. But I think that that is probably the biggest impact economically, that is undeniable, regardless of one’s theological or cultural disposition, that it really did push up a higher cost structure to some of the primary sticker price items that we have.

I think that there’s no question that more people working leads to greater productivity. And yet, then there’s trade-offs. And that's the whole point of the book I wrote, There’s No Free Lunch, everything comes with trade-offs. We don’t have time for me to right now litigate various other theological and cultural aspects of men and women and home and work and roles in society. You know, there’s a lot to unpack there. I do have opinions on it all. But it isn’t something I could get into right now. But economically, I think that women working has added to greater productivity because it’s an input, right, you get more output out of a higher input of work effort. And yet there’s been trade-offs. The trade-offs are economically at higher cost with housing and cars. And then of course, there’s other cultural trade-offs and things as well, that we could talk about another time. I hope that generally gets to answer the question.

EICHER: Well, you may have a question for David Bahnson, and if you do, please send it to us. The email address is feedback@worldeverything.com. Thank you this week to Sam Burnett and John Hildebrant. David Bahnson is founder, managing partner, and chief investment officer of the Bahnson Group. His personal website is bahnsen.com. David, thank you again, we’ll see you next time.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s the sound of a rescue helicopter in Italy. Last week a cow got a little too close to the edge of a ravine. It was foraging for food and fell down into Lake Varano. The shore line was too steep, so local firefighters got involved.

The first responders adapted a harness, carefully wrapped it around the cow, and air-lifted it to the other side of the lake. Online video shows the cow suspended more than a hundred feet in the air.

So how do you imagine the cow enjoyed its flight?

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Too bad, Jenny and I were busy on a different farm last week, so we couldn’t look into this story.

EICHER: So we’ll have to assume Mother Goose was right that the cow was over the moon.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, February 27th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Next up, the WORLD History Book. Last week, the Carter Center announced that former US President Jimmy Carter had entered hospice care. At 98, Carter has lived longer after leaving the White House than any former president in U.S. history. Today we’ll hear highlights from a handful of his speeches given during his presidency. Here’s Paul Butler.

PAUL BUTLER, REPORTER: James Earl Carter Jr. was a Naval officer, peanut farmer, democrat Georgia state senator and governor before narrowly winning election against incumbent President Gerald Ford in 1976. Carter served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981.

Our first speech excerpt comes from January 20th, 1977. It was a very cold, clear day as the newly inaugurated president addressed the nation:

CARTER: Here before me is the Bible used in the inauguration of our first President, in 1789, and I have just taken the oath of office on the Bible my mother gave me a few years ago, opened to a timeless admonition from the ancient prophet Micah: "He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." (Micah 6:8)...

Taking a page from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Carter hosted his first Fireside Chat broadcast on February 2nd, 1977—just days after taking office. The top agenda item was the energy crisis that would define his presidency.

CARTER: I would like to tell you now about one of the things that I have already learned in my brief time in office. I have learned that there are many things that a President cannot do. There is no energy policy that we can develop that would do more good than voluntary conservation. There is no economic policy that will do as much as shared faith in hard work, efficiency, and in the future of our system…

We will always be a nation of differences…but with faith and confidence in each other our differences can be a source of personal fullness and national strength, rather than a cause of weakness and division.

During his presidency Jimmy Carter oversaw the creation of the United States Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He signed The Camp David Accords—normalizing relations between Israel and Egypt. He also signed a treaty that promised to hand over control of the Panama Canal to Panama. And he entered into a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the USSR. But domestically, his administration was plagued with rising inflation and economic recession.

On July 15th, 1979, President Carter was going to speak to the nation for the fifth time on the energy crisis, but gave this speech instead on the crisis of confidence facing the nation.

CARTER: I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation…

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past…

The last year of President Carter’s term was overshadowed by the Iran hostage crisis which lasted 444 days…Ronald Reagan soundly defeated Carter in the 1980 election. The hostages were released the day Reagan was inaugurated.

One week before leaving office, Jimmy Carter gave his farewell address…January 14th, 1981:

CARTER: America did not invent human rights. In a very real sense, it's the other way around. Human rights invented America. Ours was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded explicitly on such an idea. Our social and political progress has been based on one fundamental principle: the value and importance of the individual.

Remember these words: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

This vision still grips the imagination of the world. But we know that democracy is always an unfinished creation. Each generation must renew its foundations. Each generation must rediscover the meaning of this hallowed vision in the light of its own modern challenges.

That’s this week’s WORLD History Book. I’m Paul Butler.

EICHER: Tomorrow: Parents are pushing school boards to change the rules for vetting books in school libraries…WORLD’s Mary Jackson has the story.

And, an evangelical is running for Scotland’s First Minister … what does she stand for and what are her chances to win?

That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

REICHARD: And I'm Mary Reichard. 

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

WORLD’s mission is biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

[Jesus] said to his disciples, “Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin. Pay attention to yourselves! Luke 17:1-3

Go now in grace and peace.

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