The World and Everything in It: June 20, 2025

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning—John Stonestreet here, president of the Colson Center and your longtime Culture Friday analyst.

For decades, WORLD’s steady, trustworthy reporting has served both the church and the wider culture—an antidote to the hysteria and partisanship that dominate today’s news.

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Talk to you in less than ten minutes!

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

We’ll break down the recent Supreme Court decision that puts the brakes on a runaway train, trans ideology meets legal reality.

And, looking beyond the geopolitical realities of the Israel/Iran conflict.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: That’s ahead on Culture Friday.

Also Collin Garbarino reviews Pixar’s new animated adventure about a lonely boy thrust into cosmic negotiations.

LORD GRIGON: Who is responsible for… You!

ELIO: Yes! It’s me, the leader of Earth. And the negotiation is not over.

And George Grant on the universal human tendency to mess things up.

REICHARD: It’s Friday, June 20th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

BROWN: And I’m Myrna Brown. Good morning!

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

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Israel-Iran » President Trump will decide soon whether the U.S. military will join Israel in striking Iranian nuclear sites. White House Press Secretary Karline Leavitt:

LEAVITT:  I have a message directly from the president and I quote, based on the fact that there's a substantial chance of negotiations that may or may not take place with Iran in the near future, I will make my decision whether or not to go within the next two weeks.

The United States has the only weapon that may be capable of destroying Iranian nuclear facilities buried deep below ground, its 30,000 pound so-called ‘bunker buster’ bombs.

Iranian missile strikes hospital in Israel » Meantime, in southern Israel, crews assessed damage yesterday after an Iranian missile struck a hospital, injuring dozens. Evacuations before the blast likely saved lives.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called that strike another example of the difference between Israel and Iran.

NETANYAHU: Israel is fighting to remove the nuclear and missile threat aimed at our annihilation. We're targeting military sites, we're targeting nuclear sites, we’re targeting missile sites. They're targeting a hospital.

Israeli officials accused Iran of crossing a red line with yesterday's attack...using so-called cluster bombs which are designed to spread destruction over several miles.

TikTok ban deadline third extension » Another reprieve for TikTok. President Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to keep TikTok running in the U.S. for another 90 days to give his administration more time to broker a deal to bring the social media platform under American ownership. It is the third time Trump has extended the deadline.

Karline Leavitt told reporters at the White House:

LEAVITT:   the president made a promise to keep TikTok talk on. There are a hundred million Americans who use this app. It's wildly popular. He also wants to protect Americans' data and privacy concerns on this app, and he believes we can do both things at the same time.

The president first extended the deadline by executive order on Jan. 20, his first day in office, after the platform went dark briefly when a national ban took effect.

Congress passed legislation last year requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app over national security concerns.

Critics argue President Trump’s extensions are unlawful, as the legislation only allows for a single 90-day pause.

Student visa rules » The U.S. is restarting student visa processing after a nearly month-long pause. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher has more.

BENJAMIN EICHER: Embassies and consulates will now begin vetting applicants ahead of the fall semester. As part of the process, students must now allow U.S. officials to review their social media and online activity.

The State Department says it’s looking for signs of national security threats, support for terrorism, or hostility toward American citizens and institutions.

Those who refuse access to their online presence may be denied a visa.

Officials also continue to revoke the visas of some Chinese students — especially those tied to the Chinese Communist Party or studying sensitive subjects.

Meanwhile, Harvard is still fighting the Trump administration in court over its decision to revoke a key program for international students.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

SpaceX explosion » A SpaceX rocket being tested in Texas exploded Wednesday night sending a dramatic fireball high into the sky.

The company says the Starship “experienced a major anomaly” at about 11 p.m.

NASAspaceFlight.com was live-streaming at the time:

SOUND: [SpaceX explosion]

No one was hurt in the blast.

The explosion occurred while on the test stand at Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site at the southern tip of Texas.

It marked the latest in a string of incidents this year involving the massive rockets.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has plans to build fleets of starships for interplanetary travel.

Hurricane Erick » On Mexico’s Pacific Coast, local officials and residents are surveying the damage this morning after Hurricane Erick slammed the coastline Thursday.

It roared ashore as a strong Category-3 hurricane, packing sustained winds of nearly 125 miles per hour. The winds largely died down through the day. But Robbie Berg with the National Hurricane Center said Thursday that even as the storm weakened:

BERG:   One of the biggest hazards that will remain is the heavy rainfall. We expect continuous rains in some of those mountainous areas, and some places could see upwards of 16 inches of rain.

The hurricane threaded the needle between the resorts of Acapulco and Puerto Escondido as it made landfall, tearing into a sparsely populated stretch of coastline.

I'm Kent Covington. 

Straight ahead: Culture Friday with John Stonestreet. Plus, Pixar’s latest and Word Play for the month of June.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday the 20th of June.

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

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I'm Mary Reichard. It's Culture Friday, and joining us now is John Stonestreet. He's president of the Colson Center and host of the Break Point Podcast. Good morning to you, John.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning!

REICHARD: Well, let's start with that big decision out of the Supreme Court on Wednesday in U.S. versus Skrmetti Tennessee's SB-1. Full title of that is a mouthful… Medical Procedures Performed On Minors Related to Sexual Identity. The law restricted so-called sex transition treatments for minor children, and the High Court upheld that restriction by a vote of six to three liberal justices in dissent. The majority held Tennessee's law passes rational basis scrutiny, as opposed to some heightened level of judicial review.

Rational basis is pretty easy to meet. You just have to state some plausible reason for the law, and you're good to go. Now this ruling does not apply to states that do allow for medical interventions for kids with gender dysphoria. I should add that part, but here's an interesting quote from the opinion, acknowledging that the mere reference to sex in the law does not trigger that higher level of review. And here's the quote, “Such an approach would be especially inappropriate in the medical context, where some treatments and procedures are uniquely bound up in sex.” What do you make of that, John?

STONESTREET: Well, there's a lot to make of this. First of all, it's an incredibly important case having to do with whether or not states can add restrictions to protect minors from this kind of runaway train, or what seemed like just a couple years ago, to be a runaway train of trans ideology. And as you said, and this is important, this is just a law upholding Tennessee's right to place such restrictions in law, it doesn't actually make the procedures illegal.

But there's a lot to take in, not just because of the gravity of the case, but there was a lot of concurring opinions, and there was a lot of dissents. A lot of the justices wanted to write on this and deal with it in different ways, as we've come to expect, for example, from Justice Thomas. Now Chief Justice Roberts, wrote the majority opinion, and that's what passed 6-3.

But Justice Thomas was clear. He wants to use this and invite a whole lot of scrutiny. For example, he wants to bring Bostock back into scrutiny. He thinks it was wrongly decided. He says that in his concurring opinion these treatments that are being promoted by trans activists, puberty blockers and so on are legitimate medications in certain situations that are being used in the case of mental distress, and that's not a legitimate thing, and the FDA hasn't approved that.

So he mentions all that, and says that this isn't about sex discrimination, it's about medical discrimination, which you have to keep in place in order to maintain the integrity of the medical practice. And it's also about age discrimination that we don't want to subject minors to things that they can't actually consent to. And this falls under that category.

Now that was the main concern of the majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, that really this doesn't fall under requirements of heightened scrutiny or anything like that. But Roberts went further. He went further and talked about how WPATH was an illegitimate organization. He didn't quite say it like that, but he all but said it that way. He went in and referred to the so-called “experts.” In other words, people that have propped themselves up prematurely as experts on this issue to promote this sort of medication. And he said, just because they claim to be experts doesn't mean they are. Now, again, I may be making a little edgier than he did, but it was pretty edgy.

He talked about the medical risks of using these medications for things that they're not legitimately suited for. So for example, early onset puberty or things like that. That's where these medications come in, but to use them when those medical conditions don't exist and what you're dealing with is mental distress is completely illegitimate, and he points that out. And by the way, it seemed to me that he was pointing out that the Bostock decision … and again, I took this in quickly, so I may be, I may be overstating this one. But the Bostock decision, which had to do with employment discrimination for transgender individuals. And you might remember Justice Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion in that one. He basically said it was wrongly decided and needed to be reconsidered because it created a big mess. And on this program, when we talked about that decision, we said it was a big mess and it was going to create a lot more problems downstream that was going to have to be adjudicated. That seems to me to be what Justice Thomas now is repeating and calling for.

So I think this is first of all a wonderful decision. It acknowledges how different the situation is now just two years or so. After all, this was brought to the court in terms of public opinion, in terms of what's happening in Europe, by the way, Justice Thomas mentions that in his concurring opinion. This is a loaded thing. It's a long read, but it's worth the read. Especially, I would say justice Thomas's concurring opinion, although you got to read the majority opinion to know really where he's going at.

Again, they're dealing here … Justice Roberts wanted to deal with a legal technicality that this doesn't meet the criteria for heightened scrutiny under sex discrimination. This is about age discrimination and employment discrimination, so Tennessee has a right to uphold this law. But Thomas took it further, and he acknowledges that there's been a whole mess created here, and he blames it on the so-called experts of the transgender movement, which self proclaimed and crowned themselves medical experts when they did not have it. And it's clear now that they did not have that medical expertise. Again, Thomas is writing some gargantuan concurring opinions, and this is one of them.

BROWN: Making a hard turn here, John. The Pew Research Center released its latest report on religious change around the globe. Here's the headline, “Christianity remains the world's largest religion, but it's declining globally.” Now, what's interesting to me is Iran, the striking exception. As I understand it, the underground church in Iran is one of the fastest growing in the world. That's due to the courageous efforts of believers distributing Bibles, sharing the gospel, but it's at a high cost. According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, a non-partisan, nonprofit, over the last year, violent arrests, interrogations and long prison sentences have increased six fold for the evangelical Christian community in Iran. In light of that, John, how should we Christians here in the West be thinking about what's happening between Israel and Iran right now?

STONESTREET: Well, there's a lot obviously to this story, including just geopolitical realities. There's something just amazing about such a small country like Israel able to so successfully defend itself on multiple fronts. And there's been a line that's been crossed, and certainly, unlike some other Western administrations, Israel tends to not take the crossing of those red lines lightly, and it has an incredible amount of intelligence and military capacity. This news that you're talking about in terms of the persecution directed at the church in Iran is just part of the headlines now for a decade or more, where every year is worse for Christian persecution than the year before, We heard just this week of 100 or so Christians that were slaughtered in Nigeria, again by a Fulani herdsman, who have tended to be the chief perpetrators of crimes and evils against Christians there. It's spreading through more of Nigeria. What do these things have in common? Islam.

If you look at the list of the greatest violators of human rights and the greatest violators of religious freedom and religious minority groups, it is Islam or atheism. In other words, you actually have a communist dictatorship or you have Islam. Now, what does that have in common? Views about God, and that's why we continue to say worldview matters. And when you look at these problems and these tragedies and these evils through the lens of purely geopolitical lenses, or, you know, economic lenses, you know, as as the Marxists do, or, you know, as secularists do, they look for, you know, some kind of land disputes. I mean, certainly those things factor into it.

But at the end of the day, you know Islam, when it is committed to the fundamental tenets of Islam and it takes the form of state power, they will not have any other gods. And not only that, but they specifically identify Jews and Christians as being the greatest violators and the greatest blasphemers and heretics, and that comes with the death penalty. And so it's just not surprising, unfortunately, that when Muslims live out their worldview and when it has the power of the state behind it, then you get this sort of thing.

The other topic here, of course, has to do with how God uses religious persecution to grow his church. And historically, that's been the case. Not always, I mean, we need to be really clear there's a kind of a narrative that doesn't quite take into consideration all the data. Persecution always grows the church. There's been times in history where persecution, particularly in specific times and places, has shrunk the church, but it purifies it according to Scripture. And so we know ultimately that God is sovereign over these things, and yet we still pray in this fallen world, and in this fallen context, when you have this kind of example of how how bad the fall actually is on the human condition and the sort of tragedy they can actually bring, then we pray with them: “Come quickly, Lord Jesus and make these wrongs right.”

REICHARD: John Stonestreet, president of the Coulson center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks so much, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Friday, June 20th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: a new Pixar movie debuts in theaters.

Pixar movies used to be must-see events for fans. But recently the studio has had plenty of misses. Last summer Pixar seemed to get back some of its mojo when Inside Out 2 became the top-grossing film of the year.

REICHARD: Will this summer’s offering be another blockbuster or another bust? Here’s arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino to talk about Elio

COLLIN GARBARINO: Lately, Pixar has been working from the “one for them” “one for us” model. The studio will release a crowd pleaser with broad appeal—often a sequel to one of their previous hits—and then it will release a more personal film that has significance to the filmmaker. Sometimes, those personal films resonate with audiences and lead to a new franchise… which is what happened with Inside Out. But others like 2023’s Elemental—seem like expensive exercises in navel gazing. I’m afraid Elio falls into this latter category.

ELIO: Hi.

OOOOO: [metallic squeak]

ELIO: I knew it! I knew aliens were looking for me! You saved my life! I promise I’ll pull my weight on this… uh, ship?

Elio tells the story of a young Hispanic boy named Elio Solis. He’s an orphan who lives with his Aunt Olga. He’s lonely. He doesn’t fit in with the other kids. And he always seems to be getting into trouble.

AUNT OLGA: Look at me in the eye, and for once tell me the truth.

ELIO: [speaking Elioese]

AUNT OLGA: No, I’m not learning Elioese.

ELIO: [speaking Elioese]

His aunt works for the space force, but when her eccentric nephew came to live with her, she had to put her dreams of becoming an astronaut on hold. Elio believes she resents caring for him.

AUNT OLGA: OK. I’ve got one last meeting. I need you to sit here, and not move or speak or injure yourself for 10 minutes.

Elio is so lonely that he becomes fixated on the loneliness of outer space. He believes there must be alien life somewhere out there, and he desperately wants to make contact with it. His efforts pay off when he’s picked up by the Communiverse, an interplanetary organization with representatives from a host of alien species. The Communiverse mistakenly thinks Elio is the ruler of Earth and they accept him as the planet’s ambassador.

The lonely boy is amazed by the wonders of the galaxy. And the last thing he wants to do is get sent back home. But his lack of honesty gets him stuck in the middle of a dispute between the Communiverse and an intergalactic warlord.

LORD GRIGON: Who is responsible for… You!

ELIO: Yes! It’s me, the leader of Earth. And the negotiation is not over.

Elio’s actions lead to a big mess that he eventually has to clean up. And along the way he discovers that his aunt really does love him. He also becomes friends with the warlord’s son.

GLORDON: Hi, Dad! I’m a bargaining chip.

ELIO: No, say the other thing.

GLORDON: Help me, Father. He overpowered me. He’s too strong.

The film is technically impressive, but artistically uninspiring. The Communiverse’s environment is replete with shimmering multicolored liquid and lighting effects, which are difficult and expensive to animate. But the style of the animation doesn’t break any new ground. It’s the same Pixar house style that we’ve seen before.

OOOOO: Can you understand me now?

ELIO: Yes!

OOOOO: It is a pleasure to meet you. I am [metallic noise], a liquid supercomputer. Allow me to adjust your gravity.

ELIO: Oh, no. I’m…

OOOOO: Gravity on!

Pixar replaced Elio’s director halfway through production, and the script got a total rewrite. These changes happened a few months after Disney’s CEO Bob Iger said the company would stop pushing political agendas and focus on storytelling. Coincidence? Maybe. All I know is that there’s very little agenda in the film, but also very little storytelling.

The central question of Elio is “Are we alone?” And of course the answer is no. Elio learns that he has people who care about him. Maybe that’s not a bad lesson for a kids movie, but the 100 or so minutes that it took to watch Elio felt twice as long.

Pixar used to have a subversive streak to it, but this story offers little in the way of surprises. All we get is tired cliches about accepting and tolerating those who don’t fit in.

Perhaps the only surprising thing about the film is how unlikeable Elio is. He spends the first third of the movie being a jerk to everyone. Is it any wonder he doesn’t have any friends? It feels like the filmmakers resorted to the cheap trick of making this lying, selfish kid an orphan just so we would feel a little sorry for him.

And worst of all, after the problems Elio caused, no one expects him to apologize. Instead everyone tells him how wonderful and special he is. It’s the warlord who ends up apologizing for exhibiting too much masculinity in his parenting. Blech. If I wanted to see that I would just go watch The Little Mermaid again.

I’m Collin Garbarino.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, June 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard. Up next: Word Play for the month of June, inspired by a slip-up in last month’s edition. Here’s George Grant.

GEORGE GRANT We live in a fallen world. All is awry. We are all prone to foibles, blunders, glitches, missteps, slip-ups, gaffes, and bloopers—even the most fastidious of us. Mistakes are our common lot. As Alexander Pope famously declared, “To err is human.”

Newspapers have long been plagued by misprints. Ian Mayes, a journalist for the London Guardian, quipped, “If anyone wanted to construct a machine for the production of error, a newspaper would probably be it.” As if to prove his point, his own “Corrections and Clarifications” column in the paper misspelled “misspelled,” not once, but twice! A few weeks later “typographical error” was also misspelled. The paper published a recipe for spaghetti with fennel, and rosemary but failed to include any spaghetti, fennel, or rosemary. On another occasion it offered an advice column for those suffering from “Irritable Bowl Syndrome.” It once reviewed a new production of “The Taming of the Screw.” On another occasion Mayes confessed, in his “Corrections” column, “The absence of corrections yesterday was due to a technical hitch rather than a sudden onset of accuracy.”

Of course, such typos are not limited to newspapers. Veteran broadcaster Harry von Zell once referred to the then president as “Hoobert Heever.” He immediately tried to correct himself saying “Humbert Hevor.” Thoroughly flustered and tongue tied, from there it just kept getting worse.

A 1631 edition of the King James Version Bible inadvertently left the word “not” out of the 7th Commandment, thus printing, “Thou shalt commit adultery.” In 1653 another printing promised that “the unrighteous will inherit the kingdom of heaven,” and a 1702 edition had King David complaining of “persecution by printers,” rather than “persecution by princes.”

NASA’s Mariner 1 space probe had a single errant symbol in its guidance code. The software glitch scuttled the entire mission. Science writer Arthur C. Clarke called it “The most expensive hyphen in history.”

And have you ever noticed the typo in the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital? On the north interior wall of the chamber the president’s second inaugural speech is carved into the limestone. But the word “future” was engraved as “euture,” with an “e” instead of an “f.” The flub was eventually covered over, but you can still see the error.

In 1870, German scientist Erich von Wolfe while measuring the iron content of spinach, misplaced a decimal point: recording 35 grams rather than 3.5 grams. The mistake was not discovered for more than half a century. As a result, an entire generation grew up thinking that spinach was an iron-rich super food—and thus was born the legend of Popeye.

Despite taking every precaution with copy editors, managing editors, and production editors, even here at The World and Everything in It, we can blunder our way into erratum and errata. Thankfully, while it is true that, “To err is human,” it is equally true that “To forgive is divine.”

I’m George Grant.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: All right, it’s time to name the team who helped make it happen this week:

Maria Baer, David Bahnsen, Leo Briceno, Lauren Dunn, Emma Eicher, Nick Eicher, Juliana Chan Erickson, Brad Littlejohn, Collin Garbarino, George Grant, Onize Oduah, Bekah McCallum, Mary Muncy, Josh Schumacher, John Stonestreet, Cal Thomas, Andrew Walker, and Caleb Welde.

Thanks also to our breaking news team: Kent Covington, Christina Grube, Steve Kloosterman, and Lynde Langdon.

And thanks to the Moonlight Maestros. Benj Eicher and Carl Peetz.

Harrison Watters is Washington producer, Lindsay Mast and Leigh Jones are standing in as feature editors, Paul Butler is executive producer, and Les Sillars our editor-in-chief. I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

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: “For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.” —Psalm 139:13, 14

Your weekly reminder here…go to a Bible-believing church this weekend. The Christian life is to be lived together. Be encouraged, and be an encourager.

And Lord willing, we’ll be right back here with you on Monday. Go now in grace and peace.

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