The World and Everything in It - September 15, 2021

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Good morning!

Florida governor Ron DeSantis is rising as a contender in the next presidential election.

NICK EICHER, HOST: We’ll talk about that on Washington Wednesday.

Also World Tour.

Plus, countering propaganda in North Korea.

And corporations that hope to appease some people are doing so by shutting other people down.

REICHARD: It’s Wednesday, September 15th. 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: Now the news with Kent Covington.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: California Gov. services recall election » California Gov. Gavin Newsom will serve out the rest of his term, or so it would seem.

As of midnight Eastern, with about two thirds of the votes counted, he appeared to have easily survived Tuesday’s recall election with 67 percent of voters saying no to removing Newsom from office.

The Democratic governor already sounded optimistic just a few hours before the polls closed last night.

NEWSOM: Democrats, frankly, were taking this a little bit lightly because they didn’t believe it, number one, or thought it didn’t pose a threat, number two. But I think you’ve been seeing in the early voting, Democrats have been coming out strong and I’m just humbled by that, grateful for that.

If the recall had succeeded, conservative talk radio host Larry Elder was the top choice of Newsom’s opponents.

When answering the ballot question “If Gov. Newsom is removed, who should take his place?” Elder held a 30-point lead over all other candidates as of midnight.

Newsom took office in January of 2019. He’s slated to serve another 16 months in office.

Senate lawmakers grill Blinken on Afghanistan pullout » Secretary of State Tony Blinken once again faced tough questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill Tuesday.

One day after testimony before a House panel, lawmakers on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee grilled Blinken about the administration’s handling of the Afghanistan pullout.

RISCH: The withdrawal was a dismal failure. One of the things we need to get to the bottom [of] is who’s responsible for this? Who made the decisions?

Blinken, testifying by video link, again defended the withdrawal and claimed President Biden’s hands were tied by President Trump’s withdrawal agreement with the Taliban. And he said there’s no way the Biden administration could have predicted what happened as US forces withdrew.

BLINKEN: We did not see this collapse in the matter of 11 days. But it is important that we go back and look at all of this.

GOP Senator Rand Paul also pressed Blinken about a drone strike in Afghanistan. Recent reports suggest that attack may have targeted the wrong person.

PAUL: The guy the Biden administration droned, was he an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?
BLINKEN: The administration is of course reviewing that strike, and I’m sure that a full assessment will be forthcoming.
PAUL: So you don’t know if it was an aid worker or an ISIS-K operative?
BLINKEN: I can’t speak to that, and I can’t speak to that in this setting in any event.

Intel officials warn al-Qaeda may soon rebuild, threaten U.S. homeland » Secretary Blinken also once again defended the decision to leave Afghanistan.

But as he spoke, U.S. intelligence officials warned that al-Qaeda may soon once again pose a threat to the U.S. homeland. WORLD’s Sarah Schweinsberg has more.

SARAH SCHWEINSBERG, REPORTER: Lt. Gen. Scott Berrier, who leads the Defense Intelligence Agency, outlined new intelligence estimates on Tuesday. He said with U.S. forces gone from Afghanistan, al-Qaida may be only 12 to 24 months from rebuilding and once again using Afghan soil to plot attacks against the United States.

And David Cohen, deputy director of the CIA, said intel agencies have already detected “indications of some potential movement of al-Qaeda” back to Afghanistan.

Experts have long said the Taliban still maintains ties to al-Qaeda, which took sanctuary in Afghanistan before 9/11.

Lawmakers did not ask Blinken directly about the intelligence assessments, but Blinken conceded that the Taliban had not severed its links with the terror group.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Sarah Schweinsberg. 

Nicholas pushes into storm-battered Louisiana » The storm that was Hurricane Nicholas is pushing into Louisiana this morning—a state that could certainly do without any more severe weather.

Gov. John Bel Edwards told reporters…

EDWARDS: I know that bracing for another storm while we’re still responding to and trying to recover from Hurricane Ida is not the position that we wanted to be in, but it is a situation that we are prepared for.

Forecasters warn that Nicholas could potentially stall over the storm-weary state and trigger life-threatening floods across the Deep South.

The storm has already battered the Texas coast since making landfall very early Tuesday morning. It weakened slightly before slamming the Houston area later in the day as a tropical storm. But Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told reporters…

TURNER: This storm could have been a lot worse for the city of Houston. I think we fared fairly well.

But Nicholas did knock out power to a half-million Texas homes and businesses, dumping more than a foot of rain in some places.

Galveston saw nearly 14 inches of rain from Nicholas, the 14th named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, while Houston reported more than 6 inches.

Consumer prices still climbing but more slowly » Americans are still paying more for all kinds of goods and services, but inflation is not rising quite as sharply as it did earlier in the year. WORLD’s Kristen Flavin explains.

KRISTEN FLAVIN, REPORTER: The Labor Department reported Tuesday that inflation cooled off a bit in the month of August, though consumer prices remain high. The consumer price index rose by 0.3 percent. Vehicle, hotel, and airfare costs came down slightly in August, but new car prices continued to climb. Gas prices also rose 2.8 percent from July’s rates.

Now that special unemployment benefit programs and stimulus checks have ended, more Americans will have to go back to work to balance out supply bottlenecks and keep poverty rates from rising. Job openings have continued to set record highs in recent months, even as a surge in COVID-19 infections has slowed the rebounding economy.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Kristen Flavin.

I’m Kent Covington. Straight ahead: the one thing that is really and for true the thing that is straight ahead.

Plus, something that’s ahead but not immediately straight ahead.

This is The World and Everything in It.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 15th of September, 2021.

You’re listening to WORLD Radio and we’re really glad to have you along today. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s time for Washington Wednesday.

First up, an early frontrunner among Republicans seeking to unseat President Biden—the governor of Florida.

REICHARD: WORLD Magazine national editor Jamie Dean wrote a cover story about Governor Ron DeSantis and she joins me now to talk about it. 

Good morning, Jamie!

JAMIE DEAN, NATIONAL EDITOR: Good morning!

REICHARD: Gov. Ron DeSantis has certainly gotten quite a bit of attention for his approach to the pandemic in Florida. But what else makes DeSantis notable for discussion right now?

DEAN: I’d say 2024. His name keeps coming up as a potential frontrunner for the GOP presidential nomination in three years. Of course, that’s speculation at this point, but it did gain some fresh traction this summer at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colo.

REICHARD: Ah, well, what happened there?

DEAN: Well, this is a significant gathering of conservatives that takes place each year in Denver, and it was significant for DeSantis because he won the summit’s straw poll for their pick for the presidential nomination in 2024. And he narrowly edged out former President Donald Trump, which many saw as significant, given Trump’s potential interest in running again.

REICHARD: Well, alright, let’s back up a little bit and hear about the governor’s background. Give us a quick rundown on some basic facts.

DEAN: DeSantis was raised in a middle class home in Florida. He went to Yale University, and was named Rookie of the Year on the school’s baseball team in 1998, and he later became team captain. He went on to Harvard Law School, and then served as a JAG officer in the U.S. Navy, with a tour of duty in Iraq.

REICHARD: Well, when did he get into politics then?

DEAN: In 2012, he won a seat in Congress. He started to mount a run for Senate in 2016, when longtime Florida Sen. Marco Rubio decided to run for the GOP presidential nomination. But when Rubio dropped his bid and said he planned to run for Senate again, DeSantis stepped aside.

REICHARD : Okay, so then that brings us up to 2018.

DEAN: Right, in 2018 he ran for governor—and this is really where we see DeSantis for the first time competing on a broader field that’s much more similar to the current field of national politics. Florida is divided pretty evenly between Republicans and Democrats. And the state is sort of famous for nail-biter elections decided on razor-thin margins. So it really was a bigger test for DeSantis.

REICHARD : Obviously, DeSantis won the governor’s seat, but tell us about the race.

DEAN: Well, it was a predictably close race: He won by about .4 percent of the votes, and that sent the contest to an automatic recount, which confirmed the DeSantis win. And it showed he could win an election on a bigger stage under tighter conditions.

REICHARD: So after he came into office, how did he govern?

DEAN: Well, DeSantis certainly governed as a conservative, but he also took positions that might have surprised some people. For example, he really emphasized environmentalism, particularly the importance of clean water and a healthy environment for the state’s economic well-being. He even appointed a chief resilience officer to prepare the state for the effects of sea level rise.

REICHARD: Well, Jamie, you also wrote that his first veto as governor surprised some people.

DEAN: That’s right. He vetoed a bill passed by his own party. In 2019, the GOP state legislature passed a bill that would have prevented local governments from banning single-use, plastic straws. Major business groups including the Florida Retail Federation backed the bill, but DeSantis swatted it down. He said local governments should have control over these kinds of decisions.

And here’s what I think is a key quote from DeSantis about his reasoning at the time. He said, quote, “If they’re doing things that infringe on people’s constitutional freedoms or frustrate state policy, then that becomes something that can be ripe for state intervention. Unless I see it violating some other principle, I usually just let people do as they see fit.” End quote.

REICHARD: And of course, DeSantis couldn’t have known how that principle would get tested in a really unexpected way the very next year.

DEAN: Right, now we move to the pandemic era. And this has raised all sorts of questions for DeSantis and other governors about the relationship not only between federal and state governments, but between state and local governments.

REICHARD: And Jamie, how has that played out in Florida?

DEAN: Well, when the pandemic hit, DeSantis became kind of famous for refusing to shut down immediately, though he did quickly shut down most visits to nursing homes in the state. He also issued a safer-at-home order in April, but the state really opened back up in the summer of 2020.

By the fall of 2020, DeSantis decided to open schools fully as well. This got a lot of pushback from some quarters. But six months later, in the spring of 2020, schools had not proven to be the source of spread some feared, and even his political opponents were admitting he might have been right on this one.

REICHARD: Right, and then the Delta variant came along.

DEAN: Yes, and though that hasn’t fundamentally changed the way DeSantis has done things, it has stretched the pandemic out longer than he and many others expected.

REICHARD: What have been the biggest points of tension over the summer?

DEAN: Mask mandates in schools is what has certainly drawn most attention. DeSantis has essentially prohibited local school districts from issuing mask mandates for students. Some school districts and parents in favor of mask mandates have said: I thought you were the party of small government? Shouldn’t you let local governments decide what is best in their particular circumstances for their particular population?

REICHARD: And what has been DeSantis’ response?

DEAN: Well, I think his administration argues that this is an area where they see a local government or local body infringing on individual rights. DeSantis signed an executive order in July directing school districts to allow parents to decide whether their children wear masks to school.

Some large school districts have pushed back and issued mask mandates anyway, and the state has said they will withhold some of their funding. This is playing out in the courts at the moment, and it’s really gone back and forth. In the last few days, an appeals court has said the ban on mask mandates can continue for now, and the legal action will also likely continue.

REICHARD: And what about mandates outside of state entities?

DEAN: This is certainly a point of tension, too. For example, DeSantis has sought to bar private employers from requiring vaccines as a condition of employment—and of course this is now gaining even more attention in light of President Biden’s announcement that the federal government will direct many private companies to require vaccines or proof of negative tests for employees.

A U.S. appeals court recently upheld Norwegian Cruise Line’s policy of requiring proof of vaccines, after DeSantis tried to ban that practice for cruise ships in Florida. That legal action is also continuing. I spoke with Walter Olson, a senior fellow at the libertarian CATO Institute, and he suggested this is even more complicated than it might look. He argued that private businesses should have the legal right to set the parameters they think serve their customers best.

He pointed out that cruise ships were vectors for COVID-19 at the beginning of the pandemic, and the industry likely wants to avoid more outbreaks and another round of crippling economic consequences. So there are lots of complex issues here, and I think DeSantis and the state of Florida are going to remain front and center on a lot of these questions.

REICHARD: How do you think this sets up DeSantis for 2024?

DEAN: Well I think it depends on what happens with the pandemic. But it also depends on what happens in 2022. Before DeSantis can think about running for president, he’s facing his own battle for re-election next year.

REICHARD: Well, that should give us plenty to watch!

DEAN: It certainly should.

REICHARD: Jamie Dean’s lead article on Governor DeSantis is in the September 25th edition of WORLD Magazine. Jamie, as always, thank you.

DEAN: You’re welcome.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: World Tour with our reporter in Africa, Onize Ohikere.

Nigerian school children released—We start today here in Africa.

AUDIO: [Man speaking, children laughing]

A criminal gang that kidnapped dozens of school children in northwest Nigeria earlier this month freed them on Sunday.

The governor of Zamfara State greeted busses full of children as they returned to their families.

The bandits took 75 hostages from the Government Junior Secondary School in Kaya on September 1st. Government officials say the gang released the captives in exchange for safe passage out of the forest where it had set up camp.

Since December, criminal gangs have kidnapped more than 1,000 students in central and northwest Nigeria. Although many have escaped or been released, dozens remain in captivity.

Guinea reopens borders—Next we go west, to Guinea.

AUDIO: [Woman speaking French]

Leaders of the new military government announced Monday they would begin to open the country’s borders over the next week. The junta closed all land borders after seizing control of the country earlier this month.

On Friday, a delegation from the Economic Community of West African States visited Guinea’s capital, Conakry, and met with its deposed president. They reported Alpha Conde is in good health and urged junta leaders to free him.

The acting foreign minister said she agreed in principle but that releasing the former president could prove problematic. Opposition leaders who supported the coup warn Conde could try to retake the government if not forced to leave the country.

AUDIO: [Crowds, men speaking excitedly]

On Tuesday, military leaders held talks with the country’s political parties. Meetings with religious, civic, and business groups will continue throughout the week in a step toward establishing a new civilian government.

Israeli PM visits Egypt—Next we go north, to Egypt.

AUDIO: [Man speaking, cameras clicking]

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Monday. It was the first such meeting between the two countries’ leaders in more than a decade.

They discussed common security concerns and “efforts to revive the peace process” between the Israelis and Palestinians.

AUDIO: [Man speaking Hebrew]

Bennett called the meeting “very good” and said it had strengthened ties between the two countries. Egypt became the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1979. Other countries have recently followed suit. Bennett called maintaining good relations with Cairo key to Israel’s Mid-East diplomacy.

Bangladesh reopens schools—And finally, we end today in South Asia.

AUDIO: [Sounds of children walking, talking]

Bangladesh reopened schools on Sunday, ending one of the world’s longest coronavirus shutdowns. Classrooms were closed for 18 months.

Earlier this month, the United Nations Children’s Fund warned that school closures in the region had caused significant educational setbacks. Less than half of Bangladeshis have smartphones, meaning many children did not have access to remote learning opportunities during the last year and a half.

That’s this week’s World Tour. Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Ohikere in Abuja, Nigeria.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, September 15th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: What North Korea’s Kim Jong Un fears the most.

There’s a tiny band of Christian defectors using shortwave broadcasts to reach back into the country. Their hope? To help those stuck in the world’s most totalitarian state to imagine life without the Kim regime.

REICHARD: WORLD’s Les Sillars has been working on this story for more than a year. Over the next two weekends, he’ll present a 90-minute special report. We’ll hear an excerpt in a moment, but before we do, Les is here to tell us more about the story. 

Good morning Les.

LES SILLARS, REPORTER: Good morning, Mary.

REICHARD: Les, just curious as to how this story caught your attention?

SILLARS: My daughter-in-law is very interested in human rights and in North Korea and she pointed this group out to me. And so the more I looked into them, the more interested I became. The founders of this group, Suzanne Scholte and Kim Seong Min just have these really fascinating personal stories. And I realized as I looked into what's happening in North Korea that many of my preconceived ideas about what it was like in that country, were just completely wrong.

We think of North Korea as this hermit kingdom, right, where no information gets in, and no information gets out, but I discovered that 60% of North Koreans actually do receive information from outside the country. And how did that happen? You know, Kim Jong Un doesn't like it, but he can't stop it. And I'm going well, how does this come about?

REICHARD: Why did you think it important to tell this story?

SILLARS: Well, it's North Korea, you know, it's got this unstable dictator. It's got nuclear weapons, and it's got this strange alliance with China. And one of my sources mentioned to me, you know, if somebody makes a mistake, it could lead to a global conflict.

But it's also important, because Free North Korea Radio is in the frontlines of the battle for the hearts and minds of 25 million North Koreans. If change comes to North Korea, I don't think it's going to be because of some diplomatic breakthrough. I really think that change is going to have to come from the people of North Korea themselves.

REICHARD: Final question, Les: what do you hope listeners learn from this piece?

SILLARS: I think that increasing numbers of Americans are skeptical about the value of free speech. They're more and more willing to accept censorship in various forms. And a lot of people are skeptical of the idea of truth itself.

Now, Jesus said that the truth will set you free. And here are a tiny group of people who value truth, and they value freedom. And this is what it looks like to fight for both. And I think that we can learn a lot from that.

REICHARD: Well, I can’t wait to hear it. Let’s take a few minutes to the beginning of your story:

NEWS CLIPS: … a new and deadly crackdown by Kim Jong Un … executed in public … Pyongyang is carrying out a purge … says North Korea is still cheating sanctions and enhancing its nuclear and ballistic missile programs …

LES SILLARS: The most brutal, ruthless, and dangerous dictatorship in the world…has a girl band.

MORANBONG BAND: “LET’S STUDY”

This is the Moranbong Band. About 20 members. You’d expect North Korean music groups to be mainly military bands performing odes to the Kim regime. Soundtracks for military parades in propaganda films.

These women do some of that. But they also play electric guitars and synthesizers along with violins and cellos. They have perky hairstyles. Sparkly dresses. Dance moves that are not too provocative. If a Baptist college put on a cabaret, it would look a lot like this Youtube video. It’s a tune called “Let’s Study.

The chorus goes, for those whose Korean is a little rusty (ahem)

Let’s study, let’s study, let’s study...for the benefit of our country.

And it goes downhill from there.

Kim Jong Un personally selected these women after taking power in 2011. The Kim regime has for decades sent officials throughout the countryside picking out the most beautiful girls. They serve on music and dance groups and so-called “pleasure teams.”

This band is different. The group’s leader since its founding, a woman named Hyon Song-wol, is rumored to be Kim Jong Un’s long-time mistress. He reportedly gave two thumbs up at the band’s 2012 debut.

MORANBONG BAND: DISNEY MEDLEY

The setlist included regime favorites but also the theme from Rocky and an unlicensed medley of Disney showtunes. Mickey Mouse, Pooh, Tigger, and other characters showed up and danced around the stage. The Magic Kingdom is apparently quite popular in the Hermit Kingdom.

MORANBONG BAND: DISNEY MEDLEY: MICKEY MOUSE! MICKEY MOUSE!

So, why does Kim Jong Un need a girl band? The usual explanation is that this is just propaganda under a veneer of k-pop. And it is. Clearly Kim Jong Un is trying to soften his image abroad. Or maybe he just likes movie tunes.

But there seems to be a bit more to it than that. In a real sense, Kim Jong Un started Moranbong Band because he was worried about radio shows like this one.

KOREAN ROLL: INTRO JINGLE, KOREAN VOICE

For over a decade a tiny outfit called Free North Korea Radio has been broadcasting into North Korea via shortwave. It’s produced by North Korean defectors who now live in South Korea. This is a show from 2019. Kim Ji-young is one of the defectors. Here she’s reviewing a South Korean sushi roll called a “kimbap.”

She explained that recently she took a trip by train. She didn’t need an official pass to travel in South Korea. You can go where you like. She had a few minutes before the train left. So she went into a convenience store and bought this kimbap for about a buck.

It came in triangular packaging and was hard to unwrap. She actually spilled rice and hot sauce on her skirt. She was so embarrassed, she wasn’t sure if she was eating rice or “eating embarrassment.” That’s a saying in Korea. But then she said that she’s a brave woman. She crossed mountains and a river to escape North Korea. So she looked up how to eat the kimbap on her smartphone and bought another. It was pretty good. Spicy beef.

KOREAN ROLL: KOREAN VOICE ENDS, CLOSING JINGLE

Free North Korea Radio has been producing shows like this, and many other kinds of shows, since about 2005. It was founded by Christians. And it’s been a key player in the battle for the hearts and minds of 25 million North Koreans.

The stakes could hardly be higher. North Korea has nuclear missiles, Chinese backing, and an unstable despot as leader. For 70 years the Kim regime has survived because it blocks out information from the outside world. Now that information blockade is crumbling.

So settle in for a story about power. Information. Love. Freedom. The risk of global conflict. And the grace of God. There’s a lot more story here.

REICHARD: That’s the first few minutes of Les Sillars’ special two-part series on countering propaganda in North Korea. Look for it this weekend here on your podcast feed that serves up The World and Everything in It. Or by visiting wng.org/podcasts.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Wednesday, September 15th. 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. The rights Americans take for granted are eroding. WORLD founder Joel Belz sounds the alarm.

JOEL BELZ, FOUNDER: Corporate America has become a cultural bully. Some of that perhaps predictably involves the strong-arm actions of giant corporate newcomers like Amazon, Facebook, or Apple. More ominously, it includes historic companies like Coca-Cola, Bank of America, and Delta Airlines.

The irony in all this, of course, is that these huge corporate entities—both old and new—owe their birth, their growth, and their robust history to our core freedoms. Our Bill of Rights has liberated the entrepreneurial spirit throughout our history and throughout the nation.

But that same Bill of Rights is now being gnawed away by the leaders and executives of many of the megacorporations that have benefited from its freedoms.

Carl Trueman, Ryan Anderson, and Joshua Holdenried are all serious scholars who have first-hand experience with what some folks are calling professional “snuffing.” During a recent event hosted by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, they compared notes.

Let’s start with Trueman. He’s a faculty member at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.

TRUEMAN: Early this month, I was lecturing on the topic of my book, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, over at a conference in California, hosted by a Baptist Church. And during, I think, it was the first session, the live stream by YouTube was pulled because of copyright violation. So say the organizers had been playing some music in the background that violated copyright. So the organizers sorted that issue out and then started the live stream again. And the live stream was canceled the second time, this time for content violation, apparently relative to something I said. What makes this interesting is there were two live streams going, only one of which had been made public. And it was the public one that was shut down, which would seem to indicate that the reason for the shutdown was not some algorithm catching some word or something I'd said, but it actually stemmed from a complaint from somebody watching online.

Trueman sees little chance of coincidence in the twin interruptions. Such skepticism comes in part from an experience in May when he was giving the very same set of lectures at a Christian high school in the South. Prior to his visit, the lectures had enjoyed good publicity on the school’s Instagram account. But then the company suspended the account, with a requirement that all references to Trueman and his lecture be dropped before it could be reinstated.

Ryan Anderson is president of the EPPC and author of the book When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. This past spring Amazon removed the book from its list of available titles. After weighing several possible reasons, Anderson came to this conclusion:

ANDERSON: And even in the way that they did this, they're supposed to contact the author and the publisher first to notify them to try to work it out. They didn't follow any of their own procedures. This strikes me much more like an abuse of market dominance to try to control public speech, in particular, on a matter of huge public import. We're about to have Congress redefine our civil rights laws to enshrine the concept of gender identity as a protected class with huge consequences.

Joshua Holdenried came to the discussion from his role as vice president of the Napa Legal Institute in California. Napa’s special role is to help faith-based nonprofits navigate the digital public square.

HOLDENRIED: So we started to notice as early as last fall, that several faith-based voices, faith-based organizations were being censored, deplatformed. And so we started to take notice and we started doing some preliminary research and we actually found that for several months, Big Tech companies have been actually silencing de-platforming or censoring faith-based organizations or faith-based voices at a rate of at least once a week.

Once a week! If you’re not worried about the loss of basic freedoms in our nation and culture, maybe you should be.

I’m Joel Belz.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: post-traumatic stress. The U.S. pullout from Afghanistan has been especially hard on veterans. We’ll hear one man’s story.

And, we’ll tell you about the changes the Biden administration is making to the food-stamps program.

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.

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For freedom, Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.

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.