The World and Everything in It - May 20, 2022

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Today, Buffalo and the poison of racist ideology.

NICK EICHER, HOST: John Stonestreet returns for Culture Friday and we’ll talk about that.

Plus the next installment of Downton Abbey released in theaters this week.

And Word Play with George Grant.

REICHARD: It’s Friday, May 20th. 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: House panel grills FDA chief over baby formula shortage » “Baby formula” were the two biggest buzzwords on Capitol Hill Thursday.

House lawmakers grilled the head of the FDA over a nationwide shortage of formula.

Democratic Congressman Mark Pocan of Wisconsin told FDA Commissioner Robert Califf…

POCAN: One problem that I’ve seen over and over with the FDA in my 10 years here is you guys aren’t good at communicating.

Members of a House panel said the FDA should have stepped in earlier to address problems at a baby formula plant in Michigan.

Abbott Nutrition’s facility in Sturgis is the biggest formula plant in the country. It’s been closed for months due to contamination problems, and that closure has played a major role in the shortage.

Califf told lawmakers it could be up and running soon.

CALIFF: I think we are on track to get open within the next week to two weeks most likely, at the outer bound, two weeks.

But even after Abbott flips the switch at the plant, the company has said it could take two months before new formula begins arriving in stores.

Meantime, lawmakers in the Senate approved a bill aimed at easing the baby formula shortage for families receiving government assistance through the WIC program.

The bill would allow the Department of Agriculture to waive certain rules, so that participants can buy whatever brand is available.

More Ukrainian troops surrender in Mariupol » In Mariupol, hundreds more Ukrainian fighters walked out of a bombed-out steel plant with their hands up, surrendering after defying Russian troops for weeks. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin has more.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: Thousands of Ukrainian troops made their final stand inside the plant, after holding out for as long as possible.

In the end, they were forced to choose between surrender or certain death.

The Kremlin says more than 1,700 Ukrainian troops have now surrendered.

The Red Cross registered hundreds of the soldiers as prisoners of war in hopes of ensuring their humane treatment under the Geneva Conventions.

Russian forces transported at least some of the Ukrainian troops to a former penal colony in territory controlled by Moscow-backed separatists.

Others were reportedly hospitalized.

Meanwhile, a 21-year-old Russian soldier who executed an unarmed Ukrainian civilian asked the victim’s widow to forgive him on Thursday.

The Russian army sergeant pleaded guilty this week in the first war crimes trial of a Russian soldier since the start of the war.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

Biden hosts leaders from Sweden, Finland at the White House » President Biden walked to a White House Rose Garden appearance shoulder to shoulder with Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and President Sauli Niinistö of Finland.

Biden hosted the leaders Thursday as their countries apply for membership in the NATO alliance. He voiced the “strong support of the United States”…

BIDEN: For the applications of two great democracies and two close highly capable partners to join the strongest, most powerful defensive alliance in the history of the world.

President Biden rejected Turkey's opposition, insisting the two countries—quote—“meet every NATO requirement and then some."

For a new member nation to join, all 30 existing NATO members must agree.

U.S. diplomats are trying to help mediate talks between Turkey and the two Nordic countries in hopes of resolving Turkey’s concerns.

Biden embarks on first Asia trip as president » Hours later, President Biden boarded Air Force One in route to South Korea.

This is his first trip to Asia as president. He’ll also meet with leaders in Japan.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the trip will put Biden’s Indo-Pacific strategy on full display.

SULLIVAN: It will show that the United States can at once lead the free world in responding to Russia’s war in Ukraine, and at the same time chart a course for effective, principled American leadership and engagement in a region that will define much of the future of the 21st century.

The leaders will discuss threats from North Korea, but also from China.

Former White House Asia adviser Michael Green said Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s aggressive behavior in the Indo-Pacific region are uniting U.S. allies like never before.

GREEN: For the first time really in the post-war era, our allies in Europe and our allies in Asia are coming together and recognizing that we all have something at stake in a global challenge to democracies from authoritarian states.

Biden's visit will include meetings with newly elected South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida. Their talks will also touch on trade and the global supply chain concerns.

Buffalo suspect indicted for murder » A grand jury in New York handed down an indictment Thursday against the white man accused of gunning down 10 black people at a supermarket in Buffalo. WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has that story.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, REPORTER: Payton Gendron wore an orange jumpsuit and shackles in a New York courtroom. As authorities led him out, someone shouted “Payton, you’re a coward!” from the courtroom gallery.

The 18-year-old will remain behind bars without bail.

A grand jury indicted him on a single count of first-degree murder that covers all 10 deaths in the shooting in Buffalo on Saturday.

In his first court appearance, his lawyer entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.

Authorities may still bring hate crime and terrorism charges against Gendron.

Shortly before the attack, Gendron allegedly posted hundreds of pages of writing online that detailed a fascination with white supremacist ideology. Eleven of the 13 people shot during the attack were black.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: the devastating consequences of white supremacy.

Plus, social media parlance.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Friday, May 20th, 2022. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday.

Let’s bring in John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast and he joins us now. Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning.

EICHER: Let’s talk about the tragedy and outrage of Buffalo, John, the sickening violence we saw there, and the pointless loss of life. And I’d like to hear your response to that and to the round of reporting and commentary that we’ve heard on the size and scope of white supremacy.

Depending upon how you define it, it’s everywhere or it’s nowhere. Hunter Baker, writing for WORLD Opinions, says it’s out there, but as a “low-status ideology,” it’s been driven underground and into corners of the internet.

So what to do about this? He wrote that racist ideology not only can turn violent but it is poison to the soul of the adherent. I’ll quote:

“What has happened in Buffalo and other places will likely happen again as those working out frustrations … seek to vindicate visions of racialized supremacy and survival. The ideological poison they are injecting into their spiritual veins is potent and requires the anti-venom of the true gospel.”

How do you respond to all this?

STONESTREET: Well, I really appreciate Hunter's take. Especially that last line: “the anti-venom of the true gospel,” because that's the real inadequacy that we're seeing in all the responses to this, that Christianity can respond to this but critical theory cannot. Critical theory is going to draw this line, not down the middle of the human heart as Alexander Solzhenitsyn did, but between groups of people. And that's the problem as I think there was a take in National Review earlier this week looking at that manifesto. This guy doesn't fit into a category. Now clearly, he fits into a category of someone who had horrific, evil, racialized beliefs, and that certainly contributed to it. But you can't put them on the right or the left. And that's the dominant thing that we're hearing. We have the right trying to put them on the left and the left trying to put them on the right. And, you know, the racialized ideology in and of itself isn't the only factor here. It is a primary factor here and it is something that is always awful whenever it shows up, whenever it's lived out, whenever it's acted upon. And worldviews like these do have real consequences. It doesn't do anyone any good to ignore the fact that these sorts of ideas are poison and awful. It also doesn't do anyone any good to try to use this, and use this shooting as a means to an end. It also tells you, I think, something that's really important, as you see the overall reaction to this, that critical theory, in all of its forms, is an inadequate vision of what it means to be human and an inadequate vision of our culture. But it really does have a stronghold and the more we punt to this cultural mood, this critical theory cultural mood that is dominating, the more we're going to miss the problem. And if you miss the problem, you can't have a solution. But you know, what does have a great analysis of the problem? The Gospel, because the gospel tells us who we are. It starts in creation and goes to restoration. It gives us a vision of what things put back together looks like and then also a vision of what things were intended to be in the beginning. It doesn't highlight personal guilt versus structural guilt. It has categories for both of those things, and it has a fully orbed vision of the human person and the ideas that are dominating our current cultural mood, do not.

EICHER: I want to pursue another point from this column, which is the idea of how to reach these hyper-alienated people.

“They must be reached,” he writes. “We cannot dismiss them. … Tragedies such as the one in Buffalo indicate that the task of missions extends to those who have become so disconnected from any kind of legitimate Christian belief that they either never have had the ability to think in Christian terms or have forgotten how." 

How do you think we go about that?

STONESTREET: You know, I think Hunter is exactly right. I mean, you look into the 20th century, late 1800s, early 1900s, and these cultural factors of industrialization and what this created in inner cities and what did that do? The church responded. The church responded with rescue missions. And the church responded with a Salvation Army. And the church responded trying to help wives keep their husbands from going to the bar with a paycheck and losing all their money. And the church responded in so many ways. And yes, with evangelism too, but it was all of this because of the social ills created by the social conditions. Fast forward to today, what do we have? We have an infinite capacity for distraction. We have a whole lot of immediate gratification, services, and things in our lives. But we've lost meaning and purpose. We have a catastrophic loss of meaning. We have a catastrophic sense of despair across culture. And many people are writing about this, including psychologists who are saying, maybe we need to go back to religion just so people have something bigger than their humdrum everyday lives. And you know, listen, we've got the highest standard of living ever in human history, and we don't like ourselves. So in the long term, this is a calling for the church. We're called to this time and in this place. And part of this requires that we recognize what's actually happening. And I think one way to think about it is these deaths from despair, which we have talked about in terms of addiction and suicidal ideation and just utter meaninglessness. But also the anxiety, the anxiousness, the acting out that we have seen, what I call acts of desperation. And once you start looking at culture in those two categories—despair and desperation—then suddenly these things of mass violence, this willingness to self mutilate in a never ending quest for identity, this acting out on airplanes, Americans behaving badly, all this stuff just starts to make sense. And the reason is because we don't have a why. We don't have an ultimate why in our culture. So, yes, this is a missionary calling for the church to address this.

REICHARD: There’s church and then there’s state. This brings to mind the old state mental institutions. My mom worked as a registered nurse in one in the 1960s. Those places had problems—what human institution doesn’t. They began to be shut down because states wanted to cut costs, public attitudes changed, and psychiatric drugs came out.

So mentally ill people who’d been there and looked after were handed back to families who couldn’t handle them or they resorted to living on the streets. We just don’t have long term care options for the mentally ill.

Is it time to bring those places back? What do you think?

STONESTREET: Oh, man, this would exceed my paygrade in terms of expertise, but the current situation isn't enough. And if we want to go upstream from this, we're not going to decrease the supply—and I'm using kind of crude economic terms here—of those who need this sort of help as long as we have a culture that denigrates the family in every single way. So, in other words, a culture with strong social bonds, a culture in which we care for each other, a culture in which there are institutions that catechize people and kind of cultivate them in a way of thinking and living towards flourishing, you don't need that many institutions when those things are present. But the more that these other institutions fall apart this is the thesis of a lot of recent books, including Coming Apart by Charles Murray. But the more that these other institutions become irrelevant or fall apart, then the more you're going to have people's lives falling apart. And mental illness is going to be one expression of that. And, in other words, it's like we're flooding the market with supply, and we don't have any institutions to meet that demand. And it's unsustainable, certainly in the long term.

REICHARD: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you.

EICHER: If you’d like to dig deeper and stay informed, several resources we referred to today are available to you by way of WNG.org. You can sign up there for free email newsletters at WNG.org/newsletters, three mentioned today—the Liberties newsletter by Steve West on religious liberty, the Relations newsletter by Mary Jackson, and the daily WORLD Opinions newsletter. Very simple sign-up at WNG.org/newsletters. They’re free. We just need to know your email to make sure you receive these.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: A man from Venezuela recently set a world record.

He would be the first to tell you he’s just a simple farmer. Nothing special. Just a hardworking man now in retirement.

Juan Vincente Mora says he’s motivated by “the love of God” and “the love of family.”

But there’s something quite extraordinary about his life and it’s that when he first began working the fields in Venezuela—Allied forces were defending freedom in World War I!

Mora was born in 1909, as one of 10 children.

And according to Guinness World Records, he is now the oldest man on earth. He turns 113 years old one week from today.

Feliz cumpleaños, Juan!

It’s The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Friday, May 20th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

Thanks so much for the response so far to the new donor drive! We’re very encouraged. We’re asking this month if you’re a regular listener but have never made a gift of support that you consider becoming a first-time donor this month. And as we’ve said the last several days, there’s an added incentive to become a first-time donor this week! That’s because of a longtime friend of WORLD who’s offered to match every new contribution made this week and that means today is the final day to take advantage.

EICHER: Right, please visit WNG.org/newdonor today and if you do it today, your gift gets doubled. So please take a short moment and make a big difference to help ensure that WORLD continues producing and delivering biblically objective journalism, so vitally needed in times like these. WNG.org/newdonor.

REICHARD: Coming next on The World and Everything in It: Anglophiles rejoice!

The latest installment of the beloved Downton Abbey series is here. And reviewer Collin Garbarino says it’s just as satisfying as that perfect cup of tea.

[Downton theme music]

REVIEWER COLLIN GARBARINO: Downton Abbey: A New Era arrives in theaters today, and despite its title, fans of the series will be delighted that not much has changed for the Crawley family. Everyone returns to their signature roles: Hugh Bonneville as Lord Grantham, Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary, Jim Carter as their devoted butler Carson, and the endlessly entertaining Maggie Smith once again plays the Dowager Countess Lady Violet with wit and charm.

And creator Julian Fellowes doesn’t shake up his winning formula. He built the series on three recurring plot devices: controversial inheritances, aristocratic families running out of money, and romantic entanglements. In this latest installment, Fellowes gives fans all three.

Violet: I’ve come into possession of a villa in the south of France.

Mary: What villa?

Robert: Start at the beginning.

Violet: Years ago, before you were born, I met a man.

Isobel: They spent a few days together and he gives her a house!

Mary: And you never thought to turn it down?

Violet: Do I look as though I’d turn down a villa in the south of France?

Half the story seeks to unravel the mystery of why a wealthy stranger would give a lavish French villa to the dowager countess. But she’s too sick to make the trip to look at the house. So her son, Lord Grantham, accompanied by half the household, heads to France. They’re there to take possession of the house. But they are also desperately curious to understand Violet’s relationship with this mysterious Frenchman.

Violet: And with that, I will say goodnight. And leave you to discuss my mysterious past.

The other half of the story follows what’s going on at Downton. In a never-ending quest to find enough money to keep the estate afloat, Lady Mary has allowed a film studio to use the house for a movie shoot. Lord Grantham didn’t think it a good idea, but money talks.

Robert: I haven’t been up here for years.

Mary: Well, this is the situation we’re in. With the money, we can bring the house up to snuff to match what we spent on the estate and enter the 1930s with our heads held high. But if you don’t want to…

Robert: No… No, you steer ahead. You’re the captain now. I am aware of that, even if you think I’m not.

As actors and actresses descend upon Downton Abbey, the household staff get a little starstruck. Some of them run the risk of being disappointed when they discover real-life stars aren’t quite as glamorous as their on-screen personas.

Baxter: Hello, Mr. Mosley. Why are you here?

Mosley: You know I love anything to do with films.

Baxter: I know you enjoy a trip to the pictures.

Mosley: It’s more than that. For me, Hollywood is the ultimate dream factory. And I need dreams as much as the next man.

Downton Abbey: A New Era is a love letter to the early days of “k”inematography, as Lord Grantham would say. And I found the filmmaking scenes to be the most entertaining part of the story. Fellowes gives audiences a history lesson on how those early films were made. We see the equipment and the process, and Fellowes walks us through the transition from silent film to talkies.

Watching Downton serve as a film location has a meta quality about it. We’re watching a film about a family who opens their home to a film crew so they can maintain the expensive house. And that film was filmed at Highclere Castle whose owners live there but welcome the Downton Abbey filmmakers, so they can use the money to maintain the expensive house.

The moral of the story? Big houses are expensive—which makes me wonder why the perpetually cash-strapped Crawleys are so eager to accept a French villa. Don’t worry too much about that. The scenes in France are mostly included so we can chuckle at the lovable, yet stodgy, Carson’s attempts to navigate a foreign world.

Shopkeeper: Bonjour, monsieur.

Carson: Glah. No. Cover. Cool. Yes.

Maud: Carson? May I be of help? [Speaking French]

Carson: I thought maybe this one.

Maud: Makes you look like King Zog of Albania. Oh. Perfect!

Carson: I wouldn’t hear of it.

Maud: It was my choice, so I should pay.

Carson: But I’m the one who has to wear it.

Downton Abbey: A New Era is rated PG for some suggestive talk. Longtime Downton watchers won’t be surprised at the subplot involving Thomas Barrow—the semi-closeted gay servant who’s been looking for love since season one aired in 2010. Married people also flirt with folks who aren’t their spouses, but the movie doesn’t contain any passionate scenes. The movie’s message encourages people to make wise choices and stick to their commitments.

There’s nothing new here for fans of the series, but that’s ultimately the point. We enjoy slipping into the familiar problems of familiar people. The movie closes at the end of the 1920s, and unbeknownst to the family, the stock market is about to crash. Fellowes has said he might make a third movie. If he does, expect the cash-strapped Crawleys to be looking for new ways to save Downton Abbey while straightening out their romantic entanglements.

[Downton Abbey theme]

I’m Collin Garbarino.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Friday, May 20th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

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

A week from now we’ll have our regular Listener Feedback segment. So if you have something to share with us, please do! We prefer an audio file that you record on your smart phone and email to us. You can find instructions for that at wng.org/preroll. But if you want to phone it in, you can do that too. Our listener feedback line is 202-709-9595.

Well, now it’s time for our once-a-month visit from our wordsmith, George Grant, for Word Play.

GEORGE GRANT, COMMENTATOR: The proliferation of internet technologies has created what our Anglo-Saxon forebearers might have called a “word-hoard.” The avalanche of innovative digital apps, blogs, podcasts, livestreams, and social media platforms has spawned a treasure trove of vocabulary words necessary to describe this new communications ecology.

We Instagram and Hologram. We Zoom, we Skype, and we Vimeo. We TikTok, Signal, and YouTube. We Google, Gab, and Dropbox. We SnapChat and WhatsApp. We DM and IM. We FaceBook and FaceTime. We ask Siri and Alexa.

Our culture is increasingly shaped by “hashtags,” “memes,” “trolls,” “flamers,” “spammers,” and “geeks.” Reputations are made, unmade, and dismayed by “klout scores,” “lurkers,” “avatars,” “clickbaiters,” “likes,” and “LOLs.”

The popular microblogging platform Twitter has been a particularly fertile field for clever neologisms. It has given birth to a veritable “twitterverse” of new words from “tweetcred” “twittiquette,” and “twitlit” to “twisticuffs” “twiddle” and “tweeple.” When billionaire Elon Musk made a $44 billion offer to buy the company, an apocalyptic “twitterstorm” erupted. When India’s contestant in the Miss Universe beauty pageant was outed for tweeting excerpts from a published article as if the words were her own, she was accused of “twagiarism.” And before he was banned from the platform, President Trump was regularly criticized for his “twitiarrhea.”

Created by tech entrepreneurs Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in 2006, within five years Twitter had garnered more than 100 million regular users. Five years after that it had more than 300 million and was heralded as the world’s public square.

According to Dorsey, the men originally designed the platform as an internal messaging system for their podcasting company Odeo. During a brainstorming session, they weighed various names for the service. Browsing through a dictionary they came across the word “twitter,” defined as “a short burst of inconsequential information,” and “chirps from birds.”

Novelist @NeilGaiman captured the essence of both that definition and its namesake technology asserting, “I tweet, therefore my entire life has shrunk to 140-character chunks of instant events and predigested gnomic wisdom. Oh, and swearing.” Maybe that is why novelist @TeresaMedeiros declared, “Twitter is the perpetual cocktail party where everyone is talking at once but nobody is saying anything.”

I’m George Grant—not @anything; just George Grant.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Time to thank the team members who worked on this week’s programs:

Kent Covington, David Bahnsen, Josh Schumacher, Kristen Flavin, Anna Johansen Brown, Sarah Schweinsberg, Amy Lewis, Whitney Williams, Onize Ohikere, Caleb Bailey, Janie B. Cheaney, Bonnie Pritchett, Cal Thomas, John Stonestreet, Collin Garbarino, and George Grant.

Johnny Franklin and Carl Peetz are the audio engineers who stay up late to get the program to you early! Leigh Jones is managing editor, and Paul Butler is our executive producer.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio.

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

Final word on the final day for our new donor match. Please do take advantage of the offer by a longtime friend to double all new gifts this week, meaning through today. WNG.org/newdonor. Every dollar counts, and we thank you.

The Bible says: Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Remember to worship with your brothers and sisters in Christ this weekend, and God willing, we’ll meet you right back here on Monday.

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.