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The World and Everything in It: July 3, 2023

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WORLD Radio - The World and Everything in It: July 3, 2023

On the Legal Docket, the 303 Creative case protects the freedom to disagree; on the Monday Moneybeat, the Supreme Court’s ruling against student debt cancellation will do more for the economy than President’s ‘Bidenomics;’ and on the World History Book, three speeches from 4th of July celebrations in years past. Plus, the Monday morning news


Officers standing guard outside of the Supreme Court on June 30 Mariam Zuhaib via The Associated Press

PREROLL: The World and Everything in It is made possible by listeners like us. Hi! I'm Phil Ramsey, a civil engineer in Dayton, Ohio, with my wife Jess and our boys Cliff and Drew. We are grateful for all of the World's programming, but we especially look forward to the loaded Monday podcast that includes Legal Docket and the Moneybeat. Thanks Mary and David. I hope you enjoy today's program.


MARY REICHARD, HOST: Thanks, Phil! Good morning! The Supreme Court handed down blockbuster opinions on Thursday and Friday. We’ll have a rundown for you today.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s ahead on Legal Docket. Also the Monday Moneybeat today, the economics of one of those Supreme Court decisions. And we’ll talk Bidenomics.

DAVID BAHNSEN: Biden economics means the industries of the future are going to grow right here at home. At home. I mean it. Not a joke.

No kiddin’ around. David Bahnsen will be along shortly.

And the WORLD History Book. Today U.S. Presidents reflect on the Declaration of Independence and our Founding Fathers.

RONALD REAGAN: It was their last gift to us. This lesson in brotherhood, this insight into America's strength as a nation.

REICHARD: It’s Monday, July 3rd. 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: Up next, Kristen Flavin with today’s news.


KRISTEN FLAVIN, NEWS ANCHOR: France riots » The grandmother of a French teenager killed by police is pleading for rioters to end their protests.

Violence and unrest have consumed parts of the country for almost a week.

Police have detained roughly 3,000 people since the start of the riots.

NUNEZ: [Mayor attack]

Paris Police Chief Laurent Nunez on France’s BFM-TV discussing an attack on a suburban mayor’s residence early Sunday morning.

Rioters rammed a burning car into the mayor’s home at 1:30 a.m. injuring his wife and one of his children.

NUNEZ: [Police presence]

Nunez explaining that police will keep increased numbers of officers on the streets for the coming days even as protests have eased somewhat.

Supreme Court wrap-up » The U.S. Supreme court wrapped up its term last week with a rapid fire of opinions in hotly contested cases.

Democrats are regrouping after the court ruled Friday that President Joe Biden does not have the authority to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal student loans.

Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna:

RO KHANNA: I know the president has said he isn’t going to refer students to the credit agency. I also believe under the higher education act he can stop interest accrual.

Meanwhile, college administrators are adjusting their admission procedures in response to another Supreme Court decision last week that limits the use of affirmative action.

An ABC News/Ipsos poll over the weekend showed 52 percent of Americans agreed with the decision.

And on Friday, the justices ruled that creative professionals cannot be forced to design messages with which they disagree. WORLD’s legal team has more that later in today’s program.

Republican Presidential Candidate Nikki Haley summed up the court’s accomplishments this term:

NIKKI HALEY: I think at the end of the day what the Supreme Court showed is regardless of where you were born and raised, what color you are, what gender you are, you are gonna be ablet o have individual freedom, and that’s a win for the United States of America, it’s a win for people, and I think we should celebrate it.

All of those rulings came down by a vote of 6-to-3, with the court’s six conservative justices in the majority.

Big Trump rally in S.C. » Meanwhile, the president who appointed three of those conservative justices is campaigning for reelection holding his well-known, massive rallies.

Former President Donald Trump spoke to about 50-thousand supporters who gathered in the small town of Pickens, South Carolina, over the weekend.

He decried the federal case against him over alleged mishandling of classified documents.

TRUMP: The Espionage Act has been used to go after traitors and spies. It has nothing to do with a former president legally keeping documents. As a president, the law that applies to this case is not the Espionage Act, this vicious, never used before. Never. It's only been used to me over boxes.

The rally demonstrated the level of support Trump has in the home state of two of his opponents for the Republican nomination, Senator Tim Scott and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.

Musk Twitter limits » Twitter owner Elon Musk says he is setting limits on how many tweets users can view each day. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER: Musk says the new daily limit is an attempt to prevent data pillaging from the platform.

Twitter has also said it will require users to log on before they can view tweets, a change to its longtime practice of allowing anyone who visits the site to view its content.

New, unverified users can access 500 posts per day. Veteran unverified users can see up to 1,000, and subscribers to Twitter’s Blue service can view as many as 10,000 tweets.

For WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

Ukraine latest - drone strikes on Kyiv » Ukraine says its missile defense system repelled a drone and missile bombardment on the Kyiv region over the weekend. It was Russia’s first such strike on the area in almost two weeks.

Also this weekend, Russian shelling killed three people and wounded seventeen more in southern and eastern parts of Ukraine.

ZELENSKYY: [Sanctions]

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announcing a new package of sanctions on Saturday against hundreds of individuals and entities he says are assisting Russia in its war efforts.

Baltimore shooting » In Baltimore, two people are dead and twenty-eight more are wounded after gunfire erupted at a block party in the Brooklyn Homes area over the weekend.

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott:

BRANDON SCOTT: We need accountability at every level, from those who are selling and trafficking those weapons into Baltimore from places outside of our state to companies who manufacture guns in a way that skirt gun laws in our country. And we also need community responsibility as well.

Some of those wounded were in critical condition. More than a dozen of the victims were younger than 18.

Authorities have not yet identified any suspects… or announced any arrests.

Gas prices » Gas prices monitor AAA says the nationwide average for a gallon of regular unleaded is down slightly at $3.53 cents. Last week’s number was $3.57 cents.

Washington State leads the nation with the highest statewide average at $4.98 cents per gallon. Prices in Mississippi are the lowest at $2.96 cents.

I'm Kristen Flavin.

Straight ahead: What the Supreme Court did and didn’t do in its 303 Creative case ruling. Plus, the Monday Moneybeat.

This is The World and Everything in It.


NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Monday the 3rd day of July, 2023.

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

MARY RIEHCARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. It’s time for Legal Docket, and wow! Lots to cover after last week’s set of blockbuster opinions handed down by the US Supreme Court.

Each opinion deserves deeper analysis than we have time for here, so rest assured you’ll hear that deeper analysis throughout this week, and today we will give you the basics of what you need to know.

EICHER: For now, we analyze the landmark victory for freedom of speech in the case, 303 Creative v Elenis.

The opinion reaffirms a foundational American guarantee: freedom of thought and freedom of speech without the government telling you what to say and what to think.

Many of the headlines in the immediate aftermath of the decision and through the weekend really got it wrong:

REICHARD: Yes, headlines like these: “Supreme Court limits LGBTQ protections” … Website designer “can refuse gay customers” … “Supreme Court rules for web designer who wanted to discriminate against gay clients” … “web designer can refuse business to LGBTQ people” … “Supreme Court rules for website designer who doesn’t want to serve same-sex couples” … and then Time Magazine had a headline: “Supreme Court Ruling Means Gay Marriage is Vulnerable.”

These aren’t just differences of opinion. These headlines are factually incorrect.

On the issue of refusing gay customers, or refusing business to LGBT people, let me debunk something right off the bat: The decision doesn’t mean a sandwich shop can refuse to make a sandwich for a gay person. It doesn’t mean the gym can refuse to admit a lesbian to workout. It doesn’t mean a person who identifies as trans cannot mail a parcel at UPS.

EICHER: What it does mean is that states with sexual orientation and gender identity laws … cannot use them to trump the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech. Govenment cannot compel artists to say that which violates the conscience of the artist.

In other contexts, this isn’t controversial. Listen to David Carson, a graphic design poster artist in New York City:

CARSON: I wouldn’t have done any pro-Trump posters. I wouldn’t do pro-gun posters. I wouldn’t do cigarette advertising. Graphic design has to communicate. For me there's no question that graphic design is art. There's absolutely clients I wouldn't work for and haven't because I just don't agree with where they're coming from. The idea that somebody might be able to come to me and say you have to work on this thing that you don't agree with? That's a scary place to be if as a country or we're gonna have a government start telling artists what they can do or cannot do.

REICHARD: Unlike other headlines I’ve seen, the facts of 303 Creative were no hypothetical “it’ll never happen” sort of thing.

We’ve all watched for over a decade now what happened to the cake baker in Denver, Jack Phillips. The same law at issue in this case was used to shut down part of his business and violate his rights.

Kristen Waggoner argued this case on behalf of Lorie Smith at the Supreme Court. Waggoner prepared this commentary for us on the opinion and what it means:

KRISTEN WAGGONER: The U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case 303 Creative v. Elenis is a major victory for free speech in America. And it’s a timely one, because government censorship of disfavored speech is on the rise.

The decision affirms the promise of our First Amendment: The government cannot force Americans to say things they don’t believe.

Lorie Smith owns 303 Creative. She’s a Christian graphic artist who wants to create custom wedding websites that celebrate God’s design for marriage: as between husband and wife. But she lives in Colorado, where state officials wanted to force her to say things about marriage inconsistent with her faith.

Lorie works with everyone, including those who identify as LGBT. Her lens for deciding whether to design custom projects focuses solely on the message requested, never the person requesting.

So she challenged the Colorado law. She knew her state used the same law against cake artist Jack Phillips to force him to express messages inconsistent with his beliefs.

And now the high court has affirmed Lorie’s right to speak consistent with her beliefs and made clear that all Americans have that right. Government officials cannot misuse the law to compel speech or exclude from the marketplace people whose beliefs it dislikes. This is true whether one shares Lorie’s beliefs or hold different beliefs

The United States is divided over the definition of marriage, and that’s not likely to be resolved anytime soon. The belief that marriage is a unique union between husband and wife is held by people of diverse faiths… and no faith all over the world. For many, the belief is rooted in sacred theological teaching. For others, in a sincere belief that children deserve to have a mother and a father. People can disagree with this definition of marriage. But the Supreme Court finds that attempts to silence this belief are unconstitutional.

The court’s ruling affirms that states can enforce public-accommodation laws to stop discrimination based on who someone is and also apply the First Amendment to stop government-mandated speech. We hear loud demands to conform ideologically under threat of state coercion. That makes the court’s commitment to free speech a hopeful sign.

EICHER: As Justice Neil Gorsuch who wrote the majority opinion pointed out, quoting directly now: “By Colorado’s logic, a gay man could be coerced to create a mural promoting Christian views he finds abhorrent. The progressives decrying the decision may someday appreciate the Court’s protections, and they are shortsighted to assume their views will always be ascendant.”

REICHARD: This line from the opinion caught my eye: “Consistent with the First Amendment, the Nation’s answer is tolerance, not coercion.”

In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson decry the decision as “...a sad day in American constitutional law and in the lives of LGBT people.”

But many people with the foresight to protect the free speech rights of all Americans, not just the ones that government likes, see the wisdom in this decision.

We’ll have a much deeper dive into the facts, law, and surrounding controversy when we cover 303 Creative in a summertime episode.

EICHER: But Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concern that it could be the determining factor. Listen to this exchange with Harvard’s lawyer Seth Waxman at oral argument:

CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS: So we’re talking about race as a determining factor in admission to Harvard.

SETH WAXMAN: Race for some highly qualified applicants can be the determinative factor, just as being an oboe player in a year in which the Harvard-Radcliffe orchestra needs an oboe player will be the tip.

ROBERTS: We did not fight a Civil War about oboe players. We did fight a Civil War to eliminate racial discrimination. And that’s why it’s a matter of considerable concern.

The court applied the toughest standard of judicial review, strict scrutiny. To overcome the test, colleges first must show their policies further a compelling interest. The court said the schools failed to meet that here because their diversity goals aren’t measurable. Specifically, training future leaders and promoting a robust marketplace of ideas. Too general to measure.

REICHARD: Biden v Nebraska is the opinion that says the Biden administration had no authority to cancel out student loan debt. The administration relied upon the HEROES Act passed at the start of the Iraq War to suspend student loan payments by servicemembers. That law lets the Secretary of Education “waive or modify” provisions applicable to financial assistance programs for students. The majority found he had instead transformed the law, not merely modified it.

We’ll ask David Bahnsen to weigh in on the economic import of that case, and that’s a little later today.

EICHER: In the case of the letter-carrier who didn’t want to be forced to choose between the sabbath day and his job, this one was unanimous. It increases the burden on employers who want to deny religious accommodations to employees. Here, a Christian man asked to have Sundays off. USPS honored that request at first, but supervisors said the man’s absence made for morale problems for other workers.

But that’s not enough to satisfy Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That requires an employer faced with a religious accommodation request to show that granting it would substantially increase the cost of doing business. Not merely the effect on co-workers. Case remanded, and so the religious discrimination case can proceed.

REICHARD: Lastly, a unanimous decision important to trademark law. The legal question in (Abitron Austria GmbH v Hetronic International) was whether the owner of a trademark registered in the U.S. can recover damages for use of that trademark outside the U.S. Answer: No; the presumption is that legislation usually applies only within the territorial jurisdiction of the US. Absent Congressional language to the contrary, that holds true here.

As a practical matter, U.S. trademark owners will have to sue in foreign jurisdictions to enforce against trademark infringement outside the U.S.

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: Let’s begin with Bidenomics. The president last week in Chicago:

Bidenomics is about building an economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down. And there are three fundamental changes that we decided to make with the help of Congress and been able to do it: first, making smart investments in America; second, educating and empowering American workers to grow the middle class; and third, promoting competition to lower costs to help small businesses.

EICHER: So he’s leaning in to what has been a political liability for him so far: the economy.

I say that because polls consistently rate his unfavorables higher than his favorables. Yet, here he goes with a campaign-style event with big banners in tall, white lettering “Bidenomics.” The optics about as likely to appear in Republican ads as in Democratic ads.

Which strikes me as risky.

But I read a quote in The Wall Street Journal coverage that does seem to explain the thinking of the Biden re-elect campaign. Celinda Lake, a pollster for Biden’s 2020 campaign, said voters tend to make their decisions based on the perceived direction of the economy in May or June of the election year … .” So that gives the White House 10 or 11 months to boost the president’s numbers.

So here’s my question on that, half-political, half-economic forecasting: Is it conceivable that this is a good gamble, that in 10 or 11 months, the economy is in good shape and Biden legitimately claims credit for the success of “Bidenomics”?

BAHNSEN: I don’t think that there is a way to know what the economy will be doing in 10 or 11 months, but there is a way to know if there have already been inside conversations about what the Fed is going to do or not do.

I don’t have a very strong propensity towards conspiracy; it isn’t really what I’m about, and I’m usually pretty averse to it. What I’m suggesting here is not really a conspiracy theory. It’s just established fact over many decades that there is a lot more communication between the White House and the Federal Reserve than people would think by both parties. Nixon had a lot of influence with Arthur Burns. Bill Clinton had a lot of conversations with Alan Greenspan. Reagan’s team talked a lot with Paul Volcker. So I don’t think I’m saying anything particularly out of bounds here.

What I’m trying to get at is this: If the Fed is not going to continue tightening (and in fact, there is some hope in the White House that they will be loosening next year) a change to status quo can’t be made right before the election. We’re talking about basically the whole year. That might bolster a little more confidence that we’ll be sitting in a better position in 8, 9, 10, or 11 months than is anticipated right now.

What you can’t do politically is brag about the economy and have the economy legitimately be bad, and then claim it isn’t. People know what is going on. That is similar to an argument I made in the pages of WORLD a year and a half ago, saying you can’t really convince people that we’re in a recession when no one feels like we’re in a recession. A year and a half ago, wages weren’t dropping, jobs weren’t dropping, corporate profits weren’t dropping. We could say, “well, there’s some data points that indicate we’re in a recession,” but sure enough, we weren’t. I think that was really proven over time.

If we go into a recession, it doesn’t matter. It’s a political mess for the incumbent party. But I have a feeling that the White House’s confidence is stronger than it was a couple of months ago that a recession may be averted.

EICHER: So, last time we named a political brand of economics after a president, as I remember, was Reaganomics. 40 years ago. And Reaganomics was very different from Bidenomics: lower taxes, less regulation, freer markets versus higher taxes and government spending. So maybe talk about the differences between the two.

 BAHNSEN: Well, Reaganomics had the advantage of being rather simply defined. It primarily had to do with relieving income tax burden so that marginally people had more incentive to produce. It’s the ethos of the supply side movement, that by incentivizing more supply in the economy (which you do through lowering tax burden and deregulation) you opened up more opportunity. Of course, we had just a massive wave of job production with many new jobs created, and also economic growth with a substantial increase in actual measurable output.

Bidenomics is not intending to be defined by a particular policy plank. What we could look at is Build Back Better, which didn’t pass and which was attempting trillions of dollars of tax increases and further government spending. But you can’t really look to what he didn’t pass as an element of Bidenomics. So what does it refer to?

Well, they did pass the CHIPS Act. So maybe he wants to say they’re doing more for domestic production. But that was, of course, something that President Trump had run on too. Biden hasn’t got rid of any of the tariffs that President Trump put on trade with China. So maybe he wants to run on a more economically nationalist message? I don’t imagine he plans to say that, but I can’t tell you what the specific ideology of Bidenomics would be other than just the obvious: That they do believe in spending a lot more money, and that they do want to raise taxes, but they haven’t really been able to successfully do all of that. And so I think it is meant to be a marketing term, not a policy term.

EICHER: All right, as you know, the Supreme Court struck down President Biden’s student-loan forgiveness program. It was based on the emergency provisions of the Heroes Act. The court called it an overreach. It affects 40 million Americans, estimated to cost 430-billion dollars.

We know the legalities. What is the economic significance of that decision?

BAHNSEN: Well, I happened to be on CNBC on Friday afternoon. When the news came in, I was in the middle of being interviewed. And then they took a break to go to President Biden’s press conference. Then they came back to me and I’ll tell you the same thing I said on television last Friday afternoon.

I think the Supreme Court did President Biden a huge favor, because people that are saying, “now that’s $10,000 people don’t have to go spend.” They don’t understand the way economic wealth is created. This money was already spent. The $10,000 was already spent when they were in college. So now we’re talking about paying back the government who gave the money to the end user who spent it. And so the government would have not gotten that money back. But all that would have meant is further deficits.

The primary issue here was that it would have led to higher education prices, which would have led to more bad behavior of people knowing that they can run up debt, and ultimately there would be some form of an additional forgiveness or bailout. Once the precedent was set and the Supreme Court ruled that the head of the executive branch of government can’t just on a whim forgive debt that Congress has not ruled on with money appropriated by Congress, but not forgiven by Congress—once the precedent gets set there, then there is a moral hazard that no one was really talking about. You are going to have people that would think they could go to get a master’s degree when they didn’t really need one. And I also think of credit card debt: That people would eventually believe a government program would come for that. So I think it was a very good thing what the Supreme Court did and, of course, it has the advantages of being entirely the right ruling.

And you know who else agreed that what President Biden did was illegal? President Biden, who campaigned saying, “I can’t do this, because it’s illegal,” when he was defending himself against Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, who were critical, asking, “why don’t you want to forgive student debt?” And Biden said, “it wouldn’t be legal.” So they got it right, legally, and they got it right economically.

But of course, it isn’t the Supreme Court’s job to administer economic policy. I’m just making my analysis that what they did is going to be beneficial to the economy, and it will lead to less moral hazard and less debt. This is the way we have to do economics, by counting the cost of what we don’t see. Everyone sees it as now they have $10,000 still in debt. But what you don’t see is the decision making having impacts into the future, and the free check it gives to college presidents to raise tuition, knowing that there’s that much more free government money coming to help subsidize it. These distortive effects into the economy are disastrous.

EICHER: Alright, David Bahnsen, Founder, Managing Partner, Chief Investment Officer at the Bahnsen Group, his personal website is bahnsen.com. That’s spelled B-A-H-N-S-E-N, bahnsen.com. His weekly dividend cafe you can find it dividendcafe.com. David, thank you. We'll see you next time. And in the meantime, have a terrific week. Happy holiday.

BAHNSEN: Thanks so much, Nick. Happy Fourth.


NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, July 3rd. 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. Up next, the WORLD History Book. Tomorrow is American Independence Day. So today, WORLD Radio Executive Producer Paul Butler has a few excerpts from past Presidential speeches marking the 4th of July.

PAUL BUTLER, REPORTER: For more than 220 years U.S. Presidents have marked the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence with speeches and special commemorations. In 1801 Thomas Jefferson hosted the first 4th of July celebration at the presidential residence. The event included a picnic, horse races, and parades. In the years since, most presidents have marked the anniversary with speeches of thanksgiving for the preservation of our nation’s freedoms.

Today we’ll feature excerpts from three such addresses. We begin 160 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Here’s Franklin D. Roosevelt from July 4th, 1936, speaking in front of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home

FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT: When we read of the patriots of 1776 and the Fathers of the Constitution, we are taken into the presence of men who caught the fire of greatness from one another…The source of their greatness was the stirring of a new sense of freedom. They were tasting the first fruits of self-government and freedom of conscience. Theirs were not the gods of things as they were, but the gods of things as they ought to be.

Next, July 4th, 1962. President John F Kennedy addresses 100,000 people jammed into Philadelphia’s Independence Square. With news of an emerging Atlantic partnership, Kennedy says America’s freedoms are the first fruits of what awaits the rest of the world.

JOHN F KENNEDY: On Washington's birthday in 1861, standing right there, President elect Abraham Lincoln spoke at this hall on his way to the nation's capitol. And he paid a brief but eloquent tribute to the men who wrote, who fought for and who died for the Declaration of Independence. Its essence he said, was its promise not only liberty to the people of this country, but hope to the world. Hope that in due time, the weight should be lifted from the shoulders of all men. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. [APPLAUSE]

And finally this morning, July 4th, 1986. After a nearly two year restoration project, the Statue of Liberty is about to reopen to the public in time for her 100th birthday. Ronald Regan speaks from the deck of the USS John F. Kennedy in New York Harbor ahead of a celebratory firework display. 

RONALD REAGAN: All through our history, our presidents and leaders have spoken of national unity, and warned us that the real obstacle to moving forward the boundaries of freedom—the only permanent danger to the hope that is America—comes from within. It's easy enough to dismiss this as a kind of familiar exhortation. Yet the truth is that even two of our greatest Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson once learned this lesson late in life. They'd worked so closely together in Philadelphia for independence. But once that was gained, and a government was formed, something called partisan politics began to get in the way. After a bitter and divisive campaign, Jefferson defeated Adams for the presidency in 1800. And the night before Jefferson's inauguration, Adams slipped away to Boston, disappointed, brokenhearted, and bitter. For years their estrangement lasted. But when both had retired Jefferson at 68 to Monticello, and Adams at 76 to Quincy, they began through their letters to speak again to each other. It carries me back to Jefferson wrote about correspondence with his co-signer of the Declaration of Independence, to the times when beset with difficulties and dangers, we were fellow laborers in the same cause, struggling for what is most valuable to man, his right to self-government. Laboring always at the same or with some wave ever ahead, threatening to overwhelm us and yet passing harmless, we rode through the storm with heart and hand. It was their last gift to us. This lesson in brotherhood, this insight into America's strength as a nation. And when both died on the same day, within hours of each other, that date was July 4th, 50 years exactly after that first gift to us, the Declaration of Independence.

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


NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: The Supreme Court ruled that Affirmative action is out at American colleges and universities…or is it? WORLD’s Jenny Rough will analyze what is and isn’t in the court’s ruling in the Harvard admissions case.

And, WORLD’s Classic Book of the Month. For July, Chiam Potock’s novel The Chosen.

That and more tomorrow. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: 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.

The Bible says: And when Jesus was baptized, immediately he went up from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened to him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and coming to rest on him; and behold, a voice from heaven said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” Matthew chapter 3, verses 16 and 17.

Go now in grace and peace.


WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.

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