The World and Everything in It: January 13, 2026

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Iran’s government tries to maintain control as pressure mounts in the streets.

Also today … American military readiness:

HEGSETH: When an opponent sees our well-equipped and tough-as-nails warriors, they will decide that today is not the day to test American resolve.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s the idea … but why is the U.S. military playing catch-up with China?

Later, an interview with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.

And, how Christians can help combat the alarming proximity of homelessness …

PULLEY: A lot of people are a couple wrong moves away.

REICHARD: It’s Tuesday, January 13th. 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 for the news now with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Iran wants talks / protests » President Trump says Iran wants to negotiate with the United States, even as activists report the death toll from nationwide protests has climbed to well over 600.

Protests erupted weeks ago over Iran’s collapsing economy. Activists say more than 10,000 people have been arrested since

Trump has said the United States could step in if Iran violently targets protesters … but he said Iranian leaders called on Monday .

TRUMP:  Iran wants to negotiate, yes. We may meet with them. I mean, a meeting is being set up, but we may have to act because of what's happening before the meeting. But a meeting is being set up. Iran called, they wanna negotiate.

Trump heard there aboard Air Force one.

Officials in Tehran say they remain open to diplomacy, while also blaming the unrest on outside forces, including the U.S. and Israel.

State media showed large pro-government rallies Monday, as authorities signaled they intend to crack down further on demonstrations challenging the country’s leadership.

DOJ Fed investigation » The Department of Justice is investigating Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.

The DOJ is confirming it has issued subpoenas tied to Powell’s testimony last year… about the design and price of a costly renovation of Federal Reserve buildings in Washington. The renovation totals about $2.5 billion dollars. But Powell contends …

POWELL:  No one. Certainly not the chair of the Federal Reserve is above the law, but this unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration's threats and ongoing pressure. This new threat is not about my testimony last June or about the renovation of the Federal Reserve buildings. 

He says this is about President Trump’s displeasure with him for the Fed not more aggressively cutting interest rates to boost the economy.

The White House says President Trump did not direct the investigation. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the matter is being handled independently by the Justice Department.

U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro says her office sought information after repeated outreach to the Fed, adding that legal process was used only after those efforts failed.

Sen. Kelly sues Pentagon » Arizona Senator Mark Kelly is suing the Pentagon, arguing it overstepped its authority by trying to discipline him over comments about military orders. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher has more:

BENJAMIN EICHER: Sen. Kelly, a retired Navy captain, filed the lawsuit after Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth formally censured him.

The action followed Kelly’s appearance in a video with other Democratic lawmakers that warned service members not to follow unlawful orders.

But Pentagon leaders say that what Kelly and other Democrats in that video were clearly implying was that troops should disobey directives from the Trump administration.

Hegseth says the censure could lead to a review of Kelly’s retired rank and military pay.

Kelly argues that the move amounts to retaliation for political speech and violates the Constitution.

A federal judge has scheduled a hearing later this week.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

Ukraine latest » The government of the UK is pledging to develop new tactical ballistic missiles for Ukraine. Those new deep strike missiles will carry a warhead of up to 200 kilograms over a range of more than 300 miles.

That missile will provide Ukraine with a long-range option to counter Russian aggression, according to the UK's ministry of defense. Meanwhile…

SOUND: [Drone strike in Kyiv]

...firefighters rushed to extinguish flames in Kyiv ...after a Russian drone attack on an industrial neighborhood in the capitol. No casualties were reported.

That comes as efforts to reach a ceasefire deal between Russia and Ukraine.

ZELENSKYY: [Speaking Ukrainian]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says his government is communicating with the U.S. practically every day … but Moscow has yet to show sincere interest in peace.

NYC nurses strike » Thousands of nurses went on strike Monday at major New York City hospital systems after contract talks broke down over staffing, pay, and benefits.

One nurse told reporters:

NURSE:  The strike is about getting a third contract per state for staffing, and also sticking to our health insurance, which is what Mount Sinai's trying to pull from us.

Picket lines formed outside NewYork-Presbyterian, Mount Sinai, and Montefiore hospitals. The nurses’ union says about 15,000 workers walked out. Hospitals stayed open and brought in temporary nurses to cover shifts.

Nurses say short staffing has made their jobs unsafe and pushed workloads too far. Hospital leaders say they have improved staffing in recent years and argue the union’s demands would drive costs sharply higher.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: Iran’s government tries to maintain control as pressure mounts in the streets. Plus, an interview with the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Tuesday the 13th of January.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD: And I’m Mary Reichard.

First up: the government crackdown in Iran.

The political crisis continues to deepen this week… with President Trump calling for possible military action.

EICHER: The last year in Iran saw shortages, an economic crisis, and increasing executions by the Islamic government. That culminated with demonstrators taking to the streets in large numbers last month. The protests have spread… despite a violent crackdown. As you heard moments ago, some reports say the number of dead now numbers around 600 … with thousands of arrests.

Here to talk about it is Janatan Sayeh. He’s an Iranian-American research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

REICHARD: Janatan Sayeh is focused on Iranian domestic affairs and the Islamic Republic's influence. Janatan, good morning.

JANATAN SAYEH: Good morning, great to be with you.

REICHARD: So glad you're here. The regime looks substantially weaker now than it has in the past. How can we measure that vulnerability to falling and what factors weaken it?

SAYEH: There are two factors, internal and external. Externally speaking, their proxies in the regions are severely weakened by Israeli attacks throughout the last year. When we talk about their military, of course, air defense systems are down, meaning they cannot repel external attacks. Domestically speaking, not only are they ideologically bankrupt, and not only has the 1979 Revolution proven to be deficient and incapable of governing, but more so the young people are risking their lives coming out to the streets. So this is the most fragile the Islamic Republic has been, and you can sense the paranoia given how harsh the crackdowns have been by authorities relying on foreign militias and relying on automatic weapons to attack unarmed protesters that have been protesting, entering the third week.

REICHARD: Now, you mention foreign militias. Who are these groups? And why doesn’t Iran just use internal security?

SAYEH: It is greatly dependent on how paranoid the regime is. So the Supreme Leader is increasingly concerned with defections from its own military apparatus. These are different entities that have competed with each other. And these are gaps that foreign intelligence have been able to exploit in the past. The Mossad has been able to leverage ongoing rivalries between, let's say, the Islamic Revolution in GAR Corps Intelligence Organization and the Ministry of Intelligence. So these gaps exist, and a second layer is that these militias, given that they're not Iranians, they're more likely to feel comfortable opening fire on protesters that are not of the same nationality as them. They don't speak the same language, realistically, not even the same religion. As to who they are and what their background is, most of them have been designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. Many of them are part of the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Force, the PMFs, and of course, you have the Lebanese Hezbollah come in.

REICHARD: President Trump said he's weighing his options, and Tehran has signaled that it is open to talks. What do you think would be the goals of those talks?

SAYEH: Regime officials always want to put up a facade of negotiations to ease tensions, to project a false image of improvement, to satisfy and appease their own support base, and try to maybe distract the international community and their own population from what's really going on on the ground. But that is a tactic that was used by them during the 2025 spring negotiations, that they dragged out talks without offering any concessions or anything really meaningful, just to say that one, they've exasperated all options, and the ball is in America's court, and two, to signal to the protesters that America is not on your side, that America is negotiating with us and not you. So that has been the tactic. Now, whether that would deter Washington from signaling and a strike against Iran's target, that has not been the case. Negotiations were not finally wrapped up in early 2025 before the 12 day war, and still Israel struck the Iranian side. So just because there are negotiations, that does not mean that Washington is not going to proceed with the military action against the Islamic Republic.

REICHARD: President Trump has threatened Iran with military action over killing the protesters. So what do you see as the correct way forward for the US? And I worry that this plays into the US as foreign interferer narrative. What do you think?

SAYEH: No matter what America does, these labels are going to exist even when there were no foreign interference in the past, Islamic Republic officials still blame and put these false labels on their own citizens, accusing them of being foreign agents or espionage operatives. So given that Islamic Republic has already pushed us down that road, it is really meaningful now for America to back these threats with real actions, given that Iranians on the ground are effectively begging for help, given that they're unarmed and they're getting massacred, and the numbers are increasingly looking to be in the 1000s. So really, the cat's out of the bag. It's now or never, and these remarks coming from Tehran don't carry any weight anymore.

REICHARD: All right, so, concrete steps, what's the correct way forward for the U.S.?

SAYEH: It is not about waging another war against another country. It's about enabling a democratic and secular movement to thrive in a very turbulent region. So it ultimately comes down to targeting the repression apparatus enabling Iranian protesters through cyber support and through strike funds to maintain this battle against the regime. So that would ensure that, in the long run, once we do arrive at the point of regime change, it would look more like a democratic transition with a movement that is aligned with American values.

REICHARD: And who would that be if the regime falls?

SAYEH: Protesters inside are increasingly calling for the return of the Pahlavis, the monarchy that has been really the symbol of this latest protest movement. Young Iranians only have a positive view of the past. Almost all Iranians at this point, majority of them, have been born after the ‘79 revolution, so they've only lived under the misery of the Islamic Republic, and I've only heard about how amazing the economy was under the Shah, or how great the passport was and how easily Iranians could travel abroad. It was really about that glory and about reclaiming it. But the opposition has been very clear that this would be about enabling a transition movement that would later facilitate the way for elections for Iranians to really define their form of governance, but it's a matter of getting there, and the Crown Prince is the only person that could lead that.

REICHARD: Janatan Sayeh is a research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Janatan, thank you so much.

SAYEH: Thank you for having me.

NICK EICHER: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: keeping pace with China.

Late last year, the Defense Department requested $900 billion dollars for its 2026 budget. That’s nearly double what it was a decade ago. But is it even enough and is the strategy sufficient? WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: At the end of the Cold War, the American military had a clear path to success: maintain dominance. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress this summer that the path has narrowed and China is the reason.

PETE HEGSETH: 25 years ago, our military was unchallenged, yet we squandered that advantage as China carried out an unprecedented military buildup.

The defense spending bill aims to make up for lost time: Increasing U.S. manufacturing capabilities, particularly in shipbuilding and nuclear technology. And funding the purchase of more autonomous and long-range drones.

HEGSETH: We're reestablishing deterrence. When an opponent sees our well-equipped and tough-as-nails warriors, they will decide that today is not the day to test American resolve.

Hegseth says China is the one to keep pace with … something the administration emphasized with an $11 billion dollar arms sale to Taiwan last month.

Bob Peters is a defense analyst with the Heritage Foundation.

BOB PETERS: I'm all in favor of us arming Taiwan to the teeth.

The Defense Department says China is trying to amass a large and well-trained military to project power worldwide.

PETERS: Xi Jinping, who I think is 76 years old, has said that they was that China will will solve the Taiwan issue in his lifetime.

That doesn’t leave much time to update fleets or weapons… and many of the government's biggest projects are behind schedule and over budget.

In 2018, the government decided to update the “nuclear triad”... the nation’s land, air, and sea-based systems.

A big part of that is replacing land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles. The transition was supposed to be complete 10 years from now … But this fall, the Air Force pushed completion to 2050… meaning current missiles will have been in service for 80 years. And the estimated cost will be nearly 141 billion dollars… 81 percent over the last estimate.

And that is just a single component of the update.

PETERS: So the bottom line is that we're trying to build new plutonium pits, new warheads, new bombers, new rockets, new rocket silos, new ballistic missile submarines, all at the same time, and it's not going well, because basically we took a 40 year holiday from building nuclear weapons.

Another dimension to the problem is human capital:

PETERS: Everybody who had any experience doing it all retired during that period, and we're paying the price for that now.

And unlike the Cold War, America is now facing Russia and China. But some worry the proposed strategies won’t work this time.

HENRY SOKOLSKI: The committees see a problem, and they don't have many ready solutions.

Henry Sokolski is the executive director of the Non-Proliferation Policy Education Center.

SOKOLSKI: So they go back to the solutions that were used before during the Cold War. That is excusable, explainable, but it will not be a complete thought for what we’re up against.

He agrees that the old systems need an update. But he worries this bill opens the door to build more nuclear weapons… not just replace the old ones… and that door is hard to shut.

Besides, Sokolski argues, in the last century America tried deterrence three times: before the first and second World Wars, and the Cold War. Only one of those didn’t escalate into a hot war.

SOKOLSKI: It's hard to understand how military things alone, of any sort are the winning ticket entirely. They may be necessary, but they cannot be sufficient.

Sokolski also worries that we’re sinking money into large, complicated, and expensive equipment… that we can’t manufacture quickly if it gets destroyed.

SOKOLSKI: The idea that you can concentrate military value by making a vessel bigger is simply to invite it being hit as a juicy target… if you can see it, you can hit it.

He says the way to combat this is to make things like camouflage, decoys, and cheap drones– creating more targets and hiding the biggest ones. Part of the defense bill calls for designing and manufacturing those smaller pieces of equipment—lessons learned from Ukraine’s drone warfare.

SOKOLSKI: That effort needs to be supported as much as possible, and the old ways need to be seriously questioned.

Questioned but not abandoned, defense analyst Peters says leaders shouldn’t overestimate the lessons learned from a country with few options.

PETERS: They're using the cheap drones, because they're cheap, and that's they can get their hands on and so forth.

America has more options, but what it may not have, is time. Peters and Sokolski both say that with a quarter-century of inertia away from weapons manufacturing, it will take years to right the ship.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Envisioning a New Middle East.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee remembers the day the last hostages came home.

MIKE HUCKABEE: It was that kind of moment where you remember exactly where you were. I knew most of these families, so when I saw their faces and I saw the reunions, I was just overwhelmed with a sense of joy and gratitude to God.

October 13, 2025, following 738 days of captivity.

Ambassador Huckabee says he thinks we are on the brink of a historic time in the Middle East. WORLD’s Travis Kircher talked to him recently about what that might look like.

TRAVIS KIRCHER: Mike Huckabee, shalom. Thank you for joining us.

HUCKABEE: What a pleasure. Travis, thank you for having me.

KIRCHER: I want to start with the next phase of the cease fire plan, it calls for a board of peace to replace Hamas as the ruling authority over Gaza. Who do you think should serve on this board, and how can we prevent Hamas sympathizers from getting a seat at the table?

HUCKABEE: Well, I think anyone on that board is going to be very carefully vetted. President Trump will personally oversee every single person on that board. He will be its first chair. The people who are on the board are going to be those who are committed to creating a different kind of Gaza, one that is not driven by Hamas or terror or mindset that it is okay to just murder and slaughter Jewish people. I really believe we're on the brink of something historic in the Middle East. Wouldn't happen without President Trump. He's the only person I know who could have gotten every one of the Arab nations to come to Sharm El Sheik and sign that document saying that they're going to be a part of the future of Gaza, and they're also going to be standing together to ensure that Hamas has no future there, and that they must disarm, as President Trump has told them over and over and over again,

KIRCHER: Obviously, President Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are allies, but the two have had their differences. Netanyahu himself has expressed skepticism about the proposed board of peace. Do you see friction between the two in the future?

HUCKABEE: No, I really don’t. I speak or meet with the Prime Minister almost every other day. This part of my job as ambassador from the United States. If there's any friction between the two of them on a personal level, I just simply don't see it. In fact, I would say that I think that their relationship is close enough that it can afford the differences that they sometimes have. But these aren't differences of policy. They're not differences that are divisive. My gosh, I've been married 51 and a half years, my wife and I have some differences too, but we've still been married all this length of time because we know that we can trust each other. I think, in many ways, what I see with President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu is the most amazing relationship between two world leaders who like each other personally, who enjoy each other's company, who talk regularly, but they talk honestly. And if there's a disagreement, and surely they have some, from time to time, they deal with it respectfully, and they come to a conclusion that they both are realistic and can live with that's that's how good relationships work.

KIRCHER: Talk more about the future of the Middle East generally. What does that future look like?

HUCKABEE: I think we could see something such as Abraham accords expansion in 2026 let me surprise you and tell you I think it could be that the next countries that would be a part of Abraham accords could even be Syria and Lebanon. Some. Thing that would have been unthinkable even a year ago, unheard of. It's just kind of maybe indicative of the complete realignment that's taking place in the Middle East because of a very different kind of diplomacy that President Trump is employed. President Trump is the ultimate pragmatist. He looks at every decision and wants to know two things, will it work and will it make things better? And if it won't work, he won't do it. And if it won't make things better, he won't do it. He's less concerned about the horizontal, left and right. Will it be liberal? Will it be conservative? He's interested in the vertical. Will it work? And will it make things better? And if it doesn't, then he throws out the playbook and he puts something on the table that nobody ever thought of before. And time and time again, what he puts in place of the unworkable becomes the unimaginable that actually works.

KIRCHER: So Lebanon and Syria are entertaining joining the Abraham accords?

HUCKABEE: I think it's possible. Yeah. I mean, I'm not going to make a prediction as to when or exactly how it'll all come about, but there's there's real progress being made there.

KIRCHER: What would be the implications of that, were it to happen?

HUCKABEE: It would bring an incredible calm to the northern and eastern borders that Israel has with both Syria and Lebanon. And I think the leaders of those countries do understand that they have more to gain by normalizing a relationship with Israel than they do by not. They understand Israel is not interested in in getting into an going into an incursion in either Lebanon or Syria on any permanent basis, the only thing they want is they want a secure border. Israel would love not to have anything to do with Lebanon or Syria, other than waving across the fence and saying, Good morning neighbor, and that would be a blessing to everyone on both sides of the fence.

KIRCHER: Ambassador Huckabee, thank you so much for joining us.

HUCKABEE: It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Travis.

REICHARD: We’ll run a longer discussion between Travis and Ambassador Huckabee this weekend on The World and Everything in It podcast feed.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Every January, the gadget world gathers in Las Vegas to show us the future.

And every January, someone reminds us the future might need adult supervision.

ELIZABETH CHAMBERLAIN: As I walk around the show floor today, I feel like this year's theme is just add AI and stir

Elizabeth Chamberlain talking about this year’s worst-of-show ... a voice activated A-I refrigerator.

CHAMBERLAIN: You don’t want a camera on the front of your fridge watching you all the time, do you? I don’t.

AI really was running wild.

There's the AI coach to help you on the treadmill.

The AI barista to help with making coffee.

The AI ebike that tells you when it's broken.

But I want to go back to that A-I fridge ... that may have promise. If it watches closely enough, and if the A-I is honest enough, it’ll notice what you need is for the door NOT to open ... you need it locked and you go out for a walk.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, January 13th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: getting a hand up.

Government assistance is designed to be a temporary safety net … but it often falls short, and the needs aren’t always small.

For Christians, the idea of government assistance—and the moments when it fails—raises an important question: What can the church do?

REICHARD: WORLD associate correspondent Elizabeth Shenk recently met a young woman whose unexpected journey through homelessness gave a network of churches an opportunity to help her get back on her feet.

ELIZABETH SHENK: Nina Pulley woke up in the middle of the night and looked out of her car window.

PULLEY: This is such a scary moment, but I woke up and there was a car parked across the parking lot.

After a long day of deliveries, she had parked in an empty lot behind a Chicago-area warehouse to sleep.

PULLEY: I woke up and there was a car parked across the parking lot and there's a guy staring at me. And I drove away. I was so shaken by that.

Living in her car was supposed to be temporary. She was in her early twenties - a college graduate with a stable job. She was also newly heartbroken and had decided to pack up and move, thinking she could put the pieces back together.

PULLEY: I've heard about people who have lived in San Francisco and have been homeless and they've made it somehow, but they had like actual jobs. I was like, I have DoorDash—and I have a car. Maybe I can do it for a second…

That “second” turned into six months. She’d broken her lease, and that followed her. Then, she wrecked her car in a rainstorm.

PULLEY:  I was like, man, this is the culmination of all the bad decisions that I've made and here we are and I can't escape it…

Her shelter was gone. Her livelihood was gone. And her dad had co-signed for the car, so she’d wrecked his credit, too.

PULLEY: I remember praying outside one night and asking God, like, I need you to help me. Please help me see you again because I feel like I'm not where I need to be.

When Pulley’s family discovered she’d been living in her car, they begged her to come back to North Carolina.

PULLEY: My dad was like you can't stay here.

Her father knew the feeling. He had been homeless himself when Pulley was a baby.

But going back had its own challenges.

PULLEY: It was in the boondocks. And there was no way for me to get to an interview or even get to a job if I got one…

So Pulley found a shelter in the town of Dunn. Amos Love is the director of the Beacon Rescue Mission. He connected with Pulley when she arrived.

LOVE: She wanted to be a teacher. But she didn't have the certifications or anything. That happened while she was staying with us…

The Mission gave her shelter while she worked on her teaching certifications and worked multiple jobs within walking distance. Then, she discovered DUMA—the Dunn United Ministerial Association. It’s a food pantry offering financial assistance and medical care. She met with the director, Todd Snyder, the grant magnet. He wrote over 60 grants this past year.

SNYDER:  I've got eight of them sitting in there on my desk to do in this next month.

And he helped her get her first apartment in Dunn.

PULLEY:  DUMA basically sustained me literally and literally was the reason why I was able to live there…

DUMA and the Mission partnered to get her a car. Love sent out a line to volunteers detailing Pulley’s needs.

LOVE: And a friend of ours who's a doctor, reached out and said, “We want to help with that.”

Today, two years later, Pulley is back at DUMA—one person in a sea of over 250.

SOUND: [Bustling crowd, shoppers]

She’s here as a volunteer and as a member of DUMA’s board of directors.

Pulley helps a woman navigate a grocery cart down a narrow aisle, calling her by name and carefully loading her cart with enough groceries for two weeks.

PULLEY: I started to really think about when people fall through the cracks and how difficult it is to get yourself out of that. A lot of people are a couple wrong moves away, a couple paychecks away, you know…

Pulley is also halfway through her first year as a middle-school English teacher. She’s still paying off that wrecked car, but she’s making it.

SNYDER: We like to give people a hand up, not a handout…

Todd Snyder is now teaching Pulley to write the same kinds of grants she once received.

PULLEY: I wanted to contribute to an organization in a meaningful way and get more involved in the community. I feel like as time has passed, I'm like, use me, you know, use me God.

And getting her footing means Pulley can offer a hand up to others now.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Elizabeth Shenk in Dunn, North Carolina.

NICK EICHER, HOST: 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. Governor Kathy Hochul is delivering New York’s State of the State address this afternoon … in which she’ll lay out her key priorities. One of those is to legalize doctor-assisted suicide … and make New York the 13th U.S. state, along with the District of Columbia, to allow it.

EICHER: Defending that move, the governor has taken her case beyond policy alone. WORLD Opinions commentator Bethel McGrew explains what she leaves out.

BETHEL MCGREW: Governor Hochul is preparing to sign legislation legalizing doctor assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. In explaining her decision, Hochul has repeatedly framed the issue in terms of compassion, autonomy and conscience, even invoking her own faith.

HOCHUL: I was raised in a strong Catholic family, and for many this is a moral decision, a moral judgment. And there are members of the faith community who will not accept or understand this decision I’ve made on behalf of not myself, but 20 million New Yorkers. I can’t stand here, even as a Catholic, and say I can’t allow someone else to do something that I perhaps would not do. I cannot stand in their way.

That framing sounds restrained, humble, even. The governor presents herself as stepping aside, letting individuals make deeply personal choices for themselves. But that posture depends on a comforting fiction that a policy like this is merely hands off. Hochul insists it’s not about ending life, only easing suffering.

HOCHUL: I realize we’re not talking about ending life early; we’re about ending dying early, and people can transition surrounded by family, loved ones, not in a hospital bed with strangers at a time when they just slip away after grueling pain.

But once the state blesses suicide as a possible good, even under limited conditions, that distinction cannot hold. We may continue to say suicide is never the answer, but our public policy will say sometimes it is. To reassure her critics, the governor emphasizes the safeguards she negotiated into the bill.

HOCHUL: Those are some of the constraints I put around this. They’re not impossible, but they give me the confidence to know that those voices that were so concerned about this that I’ve addressed them.

Of course, we have seen this movie before. In every jurisdiction where assisted suicide is legalized, guardrails that begin as protections are eventually redefined as obstacles. Activists press. Courts reinterpret. Restrictions loosen—and not all pressure is forcible. It can be ambient, cultural, unspoken, but the sick and elderly will hear the message loud and clear—especially in a system where death is cheaper than long term care. Governor Hochul frames the policy as a matter of personal autonomy.

HOCHUL: No one has to do this. This is a choice.

But ending a life is never a solitary act. It requires doctors, pharmacists, regulators, and ultimately the state itself. This is authorization disguised as neutrality, and that brings us back to the governor's central moral claim.

HOCHUL: If a New Yorker chooses to have that under the circumstances we pre designated, then who am I to stand in their way?

But the question is not who she is. The question is what the state becomes once it decides that helping someone die is a public good, and what it becomes once it borrows religious language to absolve itself.

Governor Hochul is free to choose this path, but she should leave God out of it

For WORLD, I'm Bethel McGrew.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Tomorrow: Female athletes fight for an even playing field at the Supreme Court. And, breaking down language barriers to spread the Gospel. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Bible says, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.” —Matthew 7:24-27

Go now in grace and peace.

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