The World and Everything in It — January 16, 2020

MEGAN BASHAM, HOST: Good morning!

The war on terror has defined U.S. foreign policy for nearly two decades. But that’s changing.

ESPER: We have entered a new era of great-power competition. China first and Russia second are now the department’s top priorities.

NICK EICHER, HOST: We’ll tell you how that’s affecting U.S. military deployments overseas.

And Open Doors releases its annual ranking of the 50 countries where it’s hardest to be a Christian. We’ll tell you which nations top that list.

Plus, Disney World is the largest single-site employer in the country. We’ll hear how a church is trying to give those workers even bigger dreams.

BARR: Walt Disney used to call them dreamers and doers. They know they’re designed for something. So we show them that God gave you that purpose.

And Cal Thomas on the latest push for freedom in Iran.

BASHAM: It’s Thursday, January 16th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Megan Basham.

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

BASHAM: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Trump, Chinese vice premier sign “Phase One” trade deal » President Trump welcomed Chinese Vice Premier Liu He at the White House on Wednesday to sign the first phase of a new trade deal.

Groups of U.S. and Chinese officials applauded as the two leaders signed the trade pact. 

TRUMP: Together we are righting the wrongs of the past, and delivering a future of economic justice and security for American workers, farmers and families. 

Among the concessions Beijing has agreed to, China will buy about $200 billion dollars worth of U.S. goods over the two years. The vice premier, heard here through a translator, read a letter from Chinese leader, Xi Jinping. 

LIU (translated): In line with market terms, Chinese businesses will purchase $40 billion U.S. dollars of agricultural products from the United States annually. If the demand is strong, the companies may buy more. 

The signing deescalates the trade war, but most tariffs will remain in place for now. President Trump said he plans to travel to Beijing soon to personally help negotiate the second phase of the agreement. 

House delivers impeachment articles to Senate » In a dramatic procession across the U.S. Capitol, Democratic House leaders marched the formal articles of impeachment to the Senate Wednesday. Moments earlier, Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke to reporters.

PELOSI: Today, we will make history. When the managers walk down the hall, we will cross a threshold in history, delivering articles of impeachment against the president of the United States for abuse of power and obstruction of the House. 

Earlier in the day, the House voted almost straight down party lines to deliver the charges. 

AUDIO: On this vote the yeas are 228. The nays are 193. The resolution is adopted, and without objection, the motion to reconsider is laid on the table. 

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler will lead the seven-member prosecution team … as the House makes its case in the Senate. But convincing a majority of senators will be difficult. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said once again on Wednesday the Democrats’ case is weak. 

MCCONNELL: House Democrats performed a pale imitation of a real inquiry. They did not pursue their own subpoenas through the courts. They declined to litigate potential questions of privilege. They pulled the plug as soon as Speaker Pelosi realized she had enough Democrat votes to achieve a political outcome. 

House committee chairman to investigate “alarming” messages related to Ukraine » Ahead of Wednesday’s House vote, Democrats released new records about the Trump administration’s Ukraine strategy. They got the documents from Lev Parnas. He is an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani. 

Among the documents was an exchange with another man about surveilling the later-fired ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Yovanovitch. 

The messages show that a Trump donor named Robert F. Hyde disparaged Yovanovitch in messages to Parnas and gave him updates on her location and cellphone use.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Eliott Engel called the revelations “profoundly alarming,” and has vowed to investigate. 

Russian PM, cabinet quit amid government shakeup » PUTIN: [Speaking in Russian]

Russian President Vladimir Putin proposed constitutional changes on Wednesday that could keep him in power long past the end of his current term in 2024.

Hours after Putin made the proposal in his annual state of the nation address, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev announced he and his entire Cabinet would resign.

Putin appointed the little-known head of Russia’s tax service, Mikhail Mishustin, to take Medvedev’s place. Mishustin is a bureaucrat with limited political experience. Analysts say he’s likely to carry out Putin’s directives with no opposition.

Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said in a tweet that Putin’s goal was to stay in charge for life. 

Putin first became president in 1999. He’s served in that role or as prime minister ever since. Josef Stalin is the only Soviet or Russian leader to hold on to power longer than Putin.

Iran lashes out at EU over nuclear deal threats » Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif accused the European Union of violating the 2015 nuclear deal on Wednesday. 

ZARIF: They are not buying oil from us, all of their companies have withdrawn from Iran. So Europe is in violation, not of its commitments after US withdrawal but of its commitments in the JCPOA.

Zarif made those claims a day after Britain, France, and Germany launched a complaint against Tehran for not complying with the agreement. That triggered a formal dispute process that requires a joint commission to seek a resolution. If it can’t, Europe would reinstate economic sanctions on Iran.

Zarif accused Europe of allowing the United States to bully it into making the sanctions threats.

Earlier on Wednesday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani issued a thinly veiled threat to European leaders. If they don’t reconsider, their soldiers might, quote— “be in danger.”

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: the Pentagon reconsiders U.S. military deployments in Africa.

Plus, a church where everyone works with the world’s most famous mouse.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MEGAN BASHAM: It’s Thursday the 16th of January, 2020. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Megan Basham.

NICK EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: getting out of Africa.

The Pentagon has been discussing troop reductions in the Middle East for years. And according to a recent report in The New York Times, Africa could be next. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper is reportedly considering a partial or complete withdrawal of the U.S. military presence in West Africa.

BASHAM: These reductions are part of a global shift away from counterterrorism deployments, and toward confronting so-called great powers. But not everyone thinks that’s a good idea. WORLD Radio correspondent Jill Nelson breaks down the benefits and risks.

JILL NELSON, REPORTER: President Donald Trump pledged to bring U.S. troops home during his campaign in 2016. He reiterated that commitment during his 2019 State of the Union address.

TRUMP: As a candidate for president, I loudly pledged a new approach. Great nations do not fight endless wars.

And as his first term draws to a close, he’s trying to make good on that promise. During a December speech at the Council on Foreign Relations, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper promoted a new global strategy.

ESPER: We have entered a new era of great-power competition. China first and Russia second are now the department’s top priorities.

That likely means less blood and treasure invested in fighting local terrorist networks, including those in Africa.

The United States currently has more than 6,000 troops deployed on the continent. Their primary mission is to train and assist local security forces in their fight against Islamic terror groups.

Gil Barndollar is a former Marine Corps captain and a senior fellow at Defense Priorities. He thinks a drawdown in Africa is a good idea.

BARNDOLLAR: The U.S. has its fingers in almost every pot to one degree or another but we haven’t really shown the ability to juggle all those things with any proficiency yet. I’m not sure the United States can walk and chew gum very well despite how big its bureaucracy is and how big its ambitions and budgets are.

He says China’s predominance in Asia and the threat that poses to the U.S. economy is far more important than terrorist activities in West Africa.

BARNDOLLAR: How much are ISIS militants and Boko Haram and other insurgents in parts of rural West Africa, how much are they really a threat to Americans on U.S. soil? I think that’s hopefully what Mark Esper and the Pentagon are starting to question as they look at our resources and our commitments.

African terror groups might not be a threat to Americans, but they’re wreaking havoc on local communities.

Twin Christmas Eve attacks in Burkina Faso killed 42 people. Boko Haram, the group behind the kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian school girls in 2014, has also increased attacks against civilians. The State Department claims terrorist attacks have doubled this past year in the Sahel, the region just below the Sahara. Churches and Christian communities are frequent targets.

In the Horn of Africa, Al-Shabaab, a group with ties to Al-Qaeda, killed almost 80 people in a December attack in the Somali capital.

Katherine Zimmerman is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who focuses on terrorist groups in Africa and the Middle East. She says it’s short-sighted to dismiss them as a threat because they haven’t launched an attack on U.S. soil.

ZIMMERMAN: It’s very clear from the past decade the role that Africa has played in terms of the Salafi-jihadi threat from groups like al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb sending financing to more lethal groups in Yemen.

Local terrorist groups often support global terrorist networks, she added.

And Secretary of State Mike Pompeo admitted in November that Islamic State militants are gaining strength in Africa. Once these groups gain ground and experience locally, they will shift their focus to the West, Zimmerman says. 

ZIMMERMAN: You only need to look at the attacks that we’ve seen in Spain and France and even in England to see the connections back to the African space.

Zimmerman says leaving Africa could create opportunities for other global powers to step in. The two most likely candidates are China and Russia, the two countries singled out by the Pentagon as posing the most threat to America. Zimmerman notes Russian mercenaries are already playing a role in Central Africa.

But there’s one thing Barndollar and Zimmerman agree on when it comes to U.S. military engagement in Africa: Something needs to change. Barndollar says a militarized foreign policy is not the answer to Africa’s economic and societal tensions.

BARNDOLLAR: It’s hard to be optimistic about a lot of these places which again raises the utility of putting American troops there and thinking we’re going to fix things largely through force of arms and security forces systems.

Zimmerman says we’ve been fighting the wrong wars. We shouldn’t be focused solely on counterterrorism in Africa.

ZIMMERMAN: What we’re not doing inside of the African continent  particularly is looking at the specific local conflicts, grievances, the governance issues, and trying to address those. We’ve done that tactically, so on a very small scale in certain villages and districts, but nothing that’s at that kind of strategic level causing change.

According to The New York Times, the Pentagon asked U.S. Africa Command to submit sometime this month a proposal for a troop drawdown and redeployment. That could include abandoning a recently completed $110 million airbase in Niger.

Meanwhile, U.S. allies in the region still consider African terror groups a significant threat. France announced this month it would send several hundred more troops to its mission in West Africa. It currently has more than 4,000 military personnel in the region and relies on U.S. support.

Reporting for WORLD Radio, I’m Jill Nelson.

MEGAN BASHAM: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Christian persecution.

NICK EICHER: Open Doors is an organization based in the United States that works to help Christian communities in the most repressive countries around the world. Here at home, it emphasizes educating Christians about the plight of their brothers and sisters overseas.

BASHAM: As part of that effort, Open Doors compiles an annual list of the 50 countries where it’s most difficult to be a Christian. The group released its 2020 World Watch List yesterday, and joining me now to talk about it is Open Doors CEO David Curry.

Good morning!

DAVID CURRY, GUEST: Good morning.

BASHAM: This year’s list gives special attention to China. You say it’s headed toward a catastrophic human rights nightmare. I don’t think that will be a big surprise to our listeners. But tell us why you think it poses the greatest threat to human rights globally.

CURRY: Well, because their surveillance system and their willingness to score and monitor their population gives them the ability now to oppress people on a scale that no one has ever been able to do before. So that level of surveillance and the ability to monitor people almost in an Orwellian sense is really what makes this such a major issue right now.

BASHAM: Open Doors tracks six different categories of religious violence. We noted that one in particular saw a dramatic increase last year. Tell us about that.

CURRY: Well, certainly. You’re going to see a lot of violence that we aren’t able to talk about because North Korea, other places, it’s very difficult to get statistics and we just only report what we can absolutely prove. But we had 2,983 Christians killed for their faith, which is actually a little bit of a drop, but it’s still a significant number. But it’s counter-balanced by the fact that there’s been so many more assaults—sexual assaults—on Christian women. There’s very significant—8,537 Christians raped or harassed for their faith. And then you see it in property as well—attacks on churches are a very significant issue right now. You have almost 9,500 churches that have been attacked in some way or another or destroyed.

BASHAM: This is all pretty discouraging, I’ll be honest. Does your report offer any good news about Christians around the world?

CURRY: Well, I think the good news is that when you have communities where Christians are in community, we’re able to keep them together to some degree, even in small groups. The faith is growing strong and it’s growing deep. That’s good news. And we saw some movement in a few political cases, you might say. Asia Bibi was held for blasphemy in Pakistan, was released. Maybe that gives us some sliver of hope that people understand the danger of a blasphemy law where people can, through vigilante justice, accuse somebody of something that would get them the death sentence. And, really, what they’re accusing them of is worshipping Jesus instead of Mohammed. So, that could be seen as a sign of progress.

BASHAM: Well, you mentioned that hopefully that will illustrate some of the dangers. You make other recommendations to U.S. and other world leaders about what they can do to help. Can you tell us a little more about those?

CURRY: Well, we really think that the State Department, which has done more than any state department that I’m aware of in the past to really raise this issue. And we’re not political. We’re just taking this a la carte—Democrat, Republican, people support the rights of Christians and others to worship freely, we’re thankful for their support. But we’re recommending that in the talks with China—trade deals and so forth—we understand and discuss human rights issues. Because if we can’t trust them to not monitor their people, how are we going to expect them to honor our intellectual property issues and surveillance issues in the economic sphere. Same with North Korea. We’re having discussions on nuclear control and making sure that doesn’t get out of hand with North Korea. But that’s hard to prove and it takes a decade or so to see if they’re really dismantling those systems, whereas we could see within 90 days if they’re really open to the international community by monitoring what are they doing, what are the human rights conditions in the labor camps where 60,000 Christians are. These kinds of things, I think, would be steps in the right direction.

BASHAM: David Curry is CEO of Open Doors. Thanks for joining us today.

CURRY: Thank you.

NICK EICHER: It’s the oldest prank in the book. Down here, kids call it “ding, dong, dash.” 

Up in Canada, they call it “nicky, nicky, nine doors.” 

You sneak up to a house, you ring the doorbell, you run and hide. 

Well, just north of Montréal, this prankster really couldn’t call it anything, and video doorbell evidence shows the reason why.

Now, notice the audio track here, and I’ve compressed the sequences, but you can hear the little rogue roots around, then … contact!

BASHAM: Haha, time to update the ringtone!

EICHER: When I say the video captures the little rogue, I need to emphasize little. The video shows it’s just a hungry squirrel, looking for something to eat.

Either that, or the winter wildlife have acquired a taste for juvenile pranks!

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER: Today is Thursday, January 16th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MEGAN BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: the power of a conversation.

The Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida is massive. Its castles, roller coasters, and theme rides cover a whopping 40 square miles! For context, Manhattan covers less ground, just 22, and San Francisco slightly more, 46 square miles.

So you can imagine that to operate a park that big takes an army of employees—75,000 of them. My husband, Brian, was once one of them!

EICHER: Big Bash was a Mouseketeer?

BASHAM: Well, a jungle cruise skipper. 

And like him, most of them stick around only a year or so before moving on, but before they do, one man wants them to encounter real purpose. WORLD Radio’s Sarah Schweinsberg has his story.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Disney World employees are all known as cast members and that doesn’t just include Cinderella and Mickey Mouse. 

BARR: It’s the person who is selling you the coffee. It’s the person who’s sweeping the street. Everyone wears the same name tag, their name and what city they’re from. 

Steven Barr is out to make friends with cast members. He walks the main promenade through Disney Springs—an outdoor shopping and dining area.

This is where cast members come to rest when their shifts end. 

BARR: A lot of cast members don’t have cars. So this is one of the places they can come and hang out. 

Barr has a gray go-tee and brown-rimmed glasses and he points at everything with two fingers. 

BARR: It’s always going to be with two fingers because that’s the Disney way. 

Barr knows the Disney way well. Thirty years ago, he played the keyboard in a Disney band. 

BARR: When you work for the mouse, you get what we call mouse blood. 

Barr left and served as a worship pastor for the next 20 years. But then a few years ago, he felt God calling him back to his Disney roots. 

BARR: I was going to plant a church in San Antonio, Texas. And I had, uh, a friend of mine…  look at me and say, why aren’t you doing this at Disney? Because everything you talk about, you have the Disney language, you’re always using Disney principles and all that. 

Barr agreed. He moved his family to Orlando and tried setting up a church. He thought in order to get Disney folks interested, he’d have to create a pretty entertaining place. 

BARR: My goal was to out Disney, Disney. And about two weeks in, I realized you can’t out Disney, Disney. And I really felt like the Lord said to me, Steven, what’s the one thing that you can offer that Disney can’t? I realized it was relationship. I felt I could almost feel like He was smiling. He says, go with that. 

To do that, Barr and his wife began planting themselves in Disney. His wife got a job in Epcot. Then his daughter. 

Cast members live in dorm-style housing, so the Barrs opened their home for meals and laundry. 

BARR: They’re able to kick their shoes off, sit on the couch, curl up and they feel at home.

Steven Barr began spending his days walking the parks looking for opportunities to strike up conversations.  

BARR: I discovered three questions that I could talk to cast members about… Hey, tell me what brought you here to Disney. Then I would ask them: What’s your favorite thing about your role here at Disney? Or I would ask them, so what do you plan on doing with what you’ve learned? The beautiful thing about those three questions is they’re telling me a little bit about their past, their present, and their future hopes.

In conversation, Barr has to be careful to respect Disney World’s no proselytizing rules. He waits for cast members to initiate spiritual conversations. 

BARR: I don’t go up to them and say, Hey, can I pray for you? That would be the last time we’d be allowed in the park to do that. 

Because Saturdays and Sundays are the busiest time of the week at Disney, the Cast Member Church meets twice at a Starbucks during the week. That’s also where Barr and his team hold numerous coffee meetings with cast members.  

Barr also makes sure employees understand the Cast Member Church is completely separate from Disney.  

BARR: He says, Oh, there’s a church for Disney? I said, well, we’re not a part of Disney, but we’re, yeah, we focus on cast members.

Right now, it’s almost 5 o’clock. 

BARR: We’re, we’re on shift change right now. So some people are going home. 

During shift changes, there are more opportunities to talk to employees. 

Barr turns into the Disney Store where everything either is or has a Disney character on it. Cast members wear blue checkered shirts with Mickey Mouse logos. Barr notices an older woman yawn. 

BARR: So I thought she was tired. So I said, you know, your shifts coming to an end, right? She goes, no, I just got started… I saw she was from El Salvador. And so we talked about that a little bit I just said, well, I hope your shift goes quickly and uh, and that was it. 

Other times, Barr’s conversations go further faster. 

He says hi to a young man in passing. They end up talking for the next 10 minutes. 

BARR: He’s from Pittsburgh. He started to share about his life. He had a girlfriend, but that all fell apart. So he just didn’t want to live in Pittsburgh anymore. I said, well, I’m the pastor of Cast Member Church. We’ll do coffee. How’s that? He’s like, yeah, that would be great. 

When he isn’t talking with cast members, Barr and his team walk the different theme parks just praying for them. Barr says a lot of Disney World employees are looking for purpose—they intentionally choose to come here thinking they’ll find it. 

BARR: Walt Disney used to call them dreamers and doers. They know they’re designed for something…but they want to make a dent in the universe. So we just kind of change it, help them change that compass and, and show them that God gave you that purpose. 

Steven Barr says the hardest part of his ministry is saying goodbye. Many Disney employees leave after just 16 months. But that’s also the biggest lesson Barr’s learned here: One moment, one conversation is more than enough to touch somebody’s life. 

BARR: So we look at it as however much time we’re given. We are going to pour into these young people and invest in them in a way so that wherever they go they’re going to take what we’ve given them and God will multiply that.

For WORLD Radio, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg reporting from Disney Springs, Florida.

MEGAN BASHAM: Next up on The World and Everything in It: a preview of this week’s Listening In.

NICK EICHER: Singer-songwriter Josh Bales grew up in a Baptist church. But he’s now an Episcopal priest. His latest album features hymns he heard for the first time as an adult, even though Christians have been singing them for hundreds of years.

BASHAM: In this excerpt of his conversation with host Warren Smith, Bales talks about why he’d like to expand the audience for those hymns.

WARREN SMITH: Well, we should probably pause and back up and talk a little about your background because you grew up in the church, but it was more of an evangelical church and you’ve had this spiritual pilgrimage, a spiritual journey towards Anglicanism and, and more liturgical forms of worship as well. And that has become a passion of yours to sort of interpret the ancient traditions of the church, the beautiful, but largely forgotten traditions of the church to the evangelical world. At least that’s the way it seems to me.

JOSH BALES: Yeah, that’s precisely, that is my passion. It is to bring what is so common, The Book of Common Prayer in some circles, to bring some of that into the other part of my, my growing up years, the, the, the people that I grew up with, the church that I grew up with. I think growing up in a Baptist church and then sort of a John MacArthur Bible kind of church setting. And then I worked in the Presbyterian Church of America for a while. And in all of those traditions, those settings, I learned to love Jesus. I learned to think about the faith, but it was some of the, the church history part that I lacked. And when I entered an Episcopal Church just haphazardly at age 18 and heard the Nicene Creed for the first time. Growing up as a Christian, never heard the creed. I mean, my mom worked at a church, I was there every, you know, every day, every time the doors were open. And I wept. Nicene Creed. And everybody around me was saying it with eyes closed and it was memorized.

SMITH: Yeah, well the part of the problem with the Episcopal Church though is they’ll say it and not believe it. And part of the problem with modern evangelical churches that they believe it and yet never say it right? Never say it out loud. Never really articulate this beautiful, clear, direct statement of the essentials of the Christian faith.

BALES: Yes. Right. I mean, I feel so blessed that I got to grow up with the piety of evangelicalism and I get to use the forms of historic Christianity. And in my parish, and in fact my diocese, were one of the last conservative diocese you, you might say in the Episcopal Church. We’re one of seven or eight Orthodox Christian diocese. So everyone’s that way. Everyone loves Jesus the way we loved Jesus in my Baptist church when I was 7 years old, but we use these forms that have been used for thousands of years and it is just a special blessing.

NICK EICHER: Today is Thursday, January 16th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

MEGAN BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham. Next up, Cal Thomas with a reminder about the blessings of personal and political freedom.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: The latest protests in Iran over the Iranian military’s “unintentional” downing of a Ukrainian jetliner are different from past protests over rigged elections, rising gas prices, and what Americans like to call “voter suppression.”

This time, the protests cover a much wider area of the country. This time, protesters did not chant “death to America” or “death to Israel.” This time, anger was directed at the theocratic regime’s handling of the missile strike. This time, a president of the United States tweeted his support for the protesters in English and in Farsi and warned “the world is watching.”

Democrats were nearly silent about the protests, even though they once boldly voiced opposition to totalitarian regimes.

Interviewed Sunday on ABC’s This Week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appeared to minimize the significance of the demonstrations. Host George Stephanopoulos asked her if she supported the demonstrations and whether it would be good for the regime to collapse.

PELOSI: The protesters are protesting—as I understand it, this brand of protesters—about the fact that that plane went down. And many students were on that plane and these are largely students in the street.

Come again?

The far left, which increasingly dominates the Democratic Party, predictably took Iran’s side against their own country. Actress Rose McGowan tweeted: “Dear #Iran. The USA has disrespected your country, your flag, your people. 52 percent of us humbly apologize. We want peace with your nation. We are being held hostage by a terrorist regime. We do not know how to escape. Please do not kill us. #Soleimani.”

A.J. Caschetta responded to McGowan and many others on the far left in National Review magazine: “While it may be tempting to dismiss McGowan’s attempts at wit, her line of reasoning, however faulty, is echoed by nearly all the Democrats on the campaign trail and by virtually every Middle East specialist in the media and in academia.”

Why aren’t the Democratic presidential candidates asked if they share such views? Perhaps it is because those asking the questions don’t want to do anything that would harm the chances of one of the Democrat presidential candidates beating President Trump in the November election. Does that sound too harsh? Consider that 92 percent of media coverage of the president has been negative, according to a study by the Media Research Center.

Could the protests in Iran follow the pattern of other freedom movements, like Solidarity in Poland, or demonstrations that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union? Or, could they end in a stalemate with increasingly brutal repression, as in Venezuela?

It’s too early to say. But we should at least expect people who enjoy the blessings of liberty—including the right to say very foolish things—to support the efforts of others who want to free themselves from totalitarian oppression.

For WORLD Radio, I’m Cal Thomas.

NICK EICHER: Tomorrow: Culture Friday. We’ve invited the president of the Southern Baptist Convention to talk with us about a controversy he sparked when he weighed in on the use of transgender pronouns. Tomorrow, J.D. Greear.

And, we’ll have a review of a new film marketed to families starring Robert Downey Jr.—a film that does little.

That and more tomorrow. 

I’m Nick Eicher.

MEGAN BASHAM: And I’m Megan Basham.

Yes, very little.

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 Apostle Paul reminds us in Ephesians that God is rich in mercy. Even when we were dead in our tresspasses, He made us alive together with Christ.

I hope you’ll have a great rest of the day. We’ll talk to you tomorrow!

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