News and Views from around the World
Two woke scolds depart
First New Zealand's Jacinda Ardern, and now Scotland's Nicola
Sturgeon: the world's chief nannies are quitting before voters
have a chance to push them out. The pair thrived off imposing
Covid restrictions, only to find far less sympathy for their blend
of woke politics and authoritarian control in 2023. It seems that,
freed from lockdowns, many people are no longer willing to
be nudged, cajoled, hectored, censored, monitored, checked,
and approved. Nor are they willing to sacrifice their rights,
their children's safety, and their standard of living to appease a
leader's appetite for hollow displays of virtue.
Excerpt from Joanna Williams, City Journal (New York), February 17, 2023.
America has become the greatest
exporter of destructive ideas
At the present time, China is the greatest threat to world stability, Russia is the world's premier aggressor-nation, and Islamist groups are the primary exporters of terror and (religious) totalitarianism.
And, for the first time in history, America is the world's major exporter of destructive ideas.
The most obvious example of America in decline is the perverse American doctrines surrounding transgender issues: the sex ("gender") of any individual is not a given fact, "men give birth", men who say they are women may compete in women's sports, and physicians and children's hospitals are right to surgically cut off the healthy breasts of young women and even girls who say they are boys.
America's war on truth, science, and children has rendered
America increasingly an outlier in the Western world. Thirteen
European countries now reject the American "non-binary"
attack on human sexuality and children.
Excerpt from Dennis Prager, Prager's Column (USA),
January 3, 2023.
On today's social media, parents need help
Parents are not enough to protect kids from the harms of social media today. And current U.S. federal law is not up to the task either. The severity of the problem of social media to children and the inability of parents to effectively protect their kids necessitate a public policy solution. And as a new report shows, parents want help. Congress needs to step up and help them.
This is a winning issue. Five Pro-Family Priorities, a new
report co-released on February 16 by the Institute for Family
Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), found
that 80 percent of parents, regardless of political party, want
parental consent required before a minor opens a social media
account and 77 percent want parents to have administrator-level
access to what kids are seeing and doing online.
Excerpt from Clare Morrell, The American Conservative,
February 22, 2023.
Inside Putin's torture chambers
Occupied Ukraine is a world of beatings, electrocution and endless pain.
With every territory that is liberated from Moscow, more of these types of stories emerge, variegated in their details, alike in their brutality. The truth is simply that this is life under Russian occupation. This is what the Russians do everywhere they go. This is what they do to their own people inside Russia.
It is just one reason why the Ukrainians refuse to surrender.
They know what will come if they do. They've seen it too
many times already. The war raging in Ukraine is over not only
national sovereignty, but also the very essence of decency — for
the right to live unmolested and unabused. They can never stop
fighting.
Excerpt from David Patrikarakos, UnHerd (London),
March 3, 2023.
World Economic Forum vs. the free world
They may fly on private jets, but at the end of the day, the World
Economic Forum cabal is just the greatest collection of thugs
organised crime has ever managed to put together in the same
room, orchestrating the most effective schemes ever devised to
force formerly free peoples to do exactly what they say.
Excerpt from J.B. Shurk, Gatestone Institute (New York),
January 25, 2023.
